Teacher: Darcie George
Program Description
The second grade curriculum is project-based with a hands-on approach and incorporates themes of movement, adaptation, and diversity. Students work at their own pace developing a work ethic and independence. Community awareness is encouraged, and many curriculum activities are designed to reinforce this concept.
Problem solving through means both academic and social is realized through interactions with teachers and other students. As in all grades, the curriculum is differentiated to meet the needs of each student at his or her level of readiness. Co-curricular classes enhance the second-grade experience, including Outdoor Education trips in the fall and spring.
Curriculum
English Language Arts
Students continue to build important reading, writing, speaking, and listening skills. They think, talk, and write about what they read in variety of texts, such as stories, books, articles, and other sources of information including the Internet. In their writing, students learn how to develop a topic and strengthen their skills by editing and revising. Activities in these areas include:
- Reading stories, including fables and folktales from different cultures, and identifying the lesson or moral of the story
- Reading to learn about history, social studies, or science and identifying the main idea
- Answering who, what, where, when, why, and how questions about stories and books
- Describing the reasons that an author gives to support a point
- Learning and using new words
- Learning the rules of spoken and written English
- Participating in class discussions by listening and building on what others are saying
- Describing in their own words information learned from articles or books read aloud
- Working together to gather facts and information on a topic
- Writing about a short series of events and describing actions, thoughts, and feelings
- Writing about opinions on books using important details and examples to support a position
- Writing to express ideas and information through poetry, stories, essays, reports, and persuasive papers
Mathematics
The Mathematics curriculum includes:
- Operations and Algebraic Thinking: Represent and solve problems involving addition and subtraction. Add and subtract within 20. Work with equal groups of objects to gain foundations for multiplication.
- Number and Operations in Base Ten: Understand place value. Use place value understanding and properties of operations to add and subtract.
- Measurement and Data: Measure and estimate lengths in standard units. Relate addition and subtraction to length. Work with time and money. Represent and interpret data.
- Geometry: Reason with shapes and their attributes.
- Mathematical Practices: Make sense of problems and persevere in solving them. Reason abstractly and quantitatively. Construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others. Model with mathematics. Use appropriate tools strategically. Attend to precision. Look for and make use of structure. Look for and express regularity in repeated reasoning.
Social Studies
The Social Studies curriculum includes:
- U.S.: Primary Pre-Columbian settlements nations in their varied regions long ago and development to the recent past; regional adaptation to their environment. Diversity of trade practices, language, customs, arts, folklore, beliefs and ideas. Impact of American Indians on U.S. development.
- World: Governmental institutions and practices in the United States and other countries. Effects of individual contributions of action and character on the development of a culture. Interaction of new settlers with the already established American Indians of the region.
- Economic: Basic economic concepts and reasoning skills and our individual roles in the economy. Regional use of natural resources.
- Geography: Map skills used to describe the absolute and relative locations of people, places, and environments. Use of maps, tables, graphs, photographs, and charts to organize information about people, places, and environments in a spatial context. Effects of geography on the way people live. Geographical features of various regions in the U.S.
Science
The Science curriculum includes:
- Physical: Characteristics of rocks, sand, and soil, the stories they tell and the forces that change them. Force and motion; simple machines.
- Life: Inherited characteristics and variations.
- Earth: Characteristics of biomes and habitats in North America and the interdependence relationships in ecosystems. Processes that shape the Earth.
- Engineering: Ask questions and define problems. Develop and use models. Plan and carry out investigations. Analyze and interpret data. Use mathematics and computational thinking. Construct explanations and design solutions. Engage in argument from evidence. Obtain, evaluate, and communicate information.
Co-Curricular Classes
Music
Spanish
Art
Woodshop
Library
Physical Education
Equestrian
Spanish
Art
Woodshop
Library
Physical Education
Equestrian
