Grade 2

Language Arts

I. READING AND WRITING

Many of the following sub-goals are designed to help children achieve the overall goal for reading in second grade: to be able to read (both aloud and silently), with fluency, accuracy, and comprehension any story or other text appropriately written for second grade. Such texts include Peggy Parrish’s Amelia Bedelia books, Lillian Hoban’s Arthur books, and second-grade-level volumes in such non-fiction series as I Can Read and Let’s Read and Find Out.

A. DECODING, WORD RECOGNITION, AND ORAL READING

Decoding is the act of turning the letters into the speech sounds they represent. Children need to understand that the sequence of sounds in a spoken word is represented by a left-to-right sequence of letters in a written or printed word. By the end of second grade, decoding should (with grade-level appropriate texts) become almost automatic, and so allow the child to focus attention instead on meaning. Depending on previous instruction and practice, some children may need to continue work with decoding skills into third grade.

· Accurately decode phonetically regular two-syllable words (for example, basket, rabbit).

· Use knowledge of letter-sound patterns to sound out unfamiliar multisyllable words when reading (for example, caterpillar, motorcycle).

· Recognize and compare the sounds that make up words, and segment and blend a variety of sounds in words.

· Accurately read single-syllable words and most two-syllable words, including

o irregularly spelled words (for example, tough, through)

o words with dipthongs (for example, the oy sound in boy)

o words with special vowel spellings (for example, the ow sound in now and clown, the long i sound in night)

o words with common beginnings and endings (for example, the spr- beginning in spring, the -le ending in apple and riddle)

B. READING COMPREHENSION AND RESPONSE

·Reread sentences when he or she does not understand the text.

·Recall incidents, characters, facts, and details of stories and other texts.

·Discuss similarities in characters and events across stories.

·Gain answers to specific questions from reading nonfiction materials and interpret information from simple diagrams, charts and graphs.

·Pose plausible answers to how, why, and what-if questions in interpreting texts, both fiction and nonfiction.

·Explain and describe new concepts and information in his or her own words.

·Demonstrate familiarity with a variety of fiction and nonfiction selections, including both read-aloud works and independent readings.

C. WRITING

· Produce a variety of types of writing – such as stories, reports, poems, letters, descriptions – and make reasonable judgments about what to include in his or her own written works based on the purpose and type of composition.

· With assistance, produce written work with a beginning, middle and end and, when appropriate, organize material in paragraphs.

· With assistance, revise and edit to clarify and refine his or her meaning in writing, and attend to spelling, mechanics, and presentation in final drafts of selected works.

D. SPELLING, GRAMMER AND USAGE

· When spelling independently, represent all the sounds of a word, writing each sound as a letter or combination of letters.

· Correctly spell any word that contains spelling patterns he or she has been taught so far, and begin to use a first dictionary to check and correct spelling in his or her own writings.

· Write legibly on standard-ruled notebook paper.

· Understand what a complete sentence is, and identify subject and predicate in simple sentences.

· Identify parts of speech:

o nouns (for concrete nouns),

o verbs (for active verbs),

o simple adjectives.

· Use adjectives to compare by adding –er and –est.

· Change regular verbs from simple present to past tense using –ed.

· Use the correct forms for present and past tense of common irregular verbs (for example, be, have, see, do, go, come, run, give, sing).

· Recognize singular and plural nouns, and

o form the regular plural by adding -s

o know to add -es to nouns ending in s, ss, sh, ch, x

o know that some nouns change their spelling in plural form (for example, man, men; woman, women; child, children; tooth, teeth; foot, feet).

· Use capital letters for:

o the first word of a sentence

o proper nouns

o the pronoun I

o holidays and months and days of the week

o names of countries, cities, states

o main words in titles

o initials.

· Consistently use correct end punctuation: period, question mark, or exclamation point.

· Recognize the comma and how to use it between day and year when writing a date, and between city and state in an address.

· Recognize the apostrophe and how it is used in common contractions (for example, isn’t, aren’t, can’t, don’t, I’m, you’re).

· Recognize common abbreviations (for example, St., Rd., Mr., Mrs., Ms., Dr.)

· Understand what synonyms and antonyms are, and provide synonyms or antonyms for given words (for example, happy, glad; hot, cold).

II. POETRY

Bed in Summer (Robert Louis Stevenson)

Bee! I’m Expecting You! (Emily Dickinson)

Buffalo Dusk (Carl Sandburg)

Caterpillars (Aileen Fisher)

Discovery (Harry Behn)

Hurt No Living Thing (Christina Rossetti)

Harriet Tubman (Eloise Greenfield)

Lincoln (Nancy Byrd Turner)

The Night Before Christmas (Clement Clarke Moore)

Seashell (Frederico García Lorca)

Something Told the Wild Geese (Rachel Field)

Rudolph is Tired of the City (Gwendolyn Brooks)

Smart (Shel Silverstein)

Who Has Seen the Wind? (Christina Rossetti)

Windy Nights (Robert Louis Stevenson))

There was an Old Man with a Beard (Edward Lear)

III. FICTION

A. STORIES

Beauty and the Beast

The Blind Men and the Elephant (a fable from India)

A Christmas Carol (Charles Dickens)

Charlotte’s Web (E.B. White)

The Emperor’s New Clothes (Hans Christian Anderson)

The Fisherman and His Wife (Brothers Grimm)

How the Camel Got His Hump (a “Just-So” story by Rudyard Kipling)

Iktomi stories (legends of the Plains Indian trickster figure, such as How Iktomi Lost His

Eyes; Iktomi and the Berries; Iktomi and the Boulder)

The Magic Paintbrush (a Chinese folktale)

El Pajara Cu (a Hispanic folktale)

selections from Peter Pan (James M. Barrie)

Talk (a West African folk tale)

The Tiger, the Brahman, and the Jackal (a folk tale from India)

The Tongue-Cut Sparrow (a Japanese folk tale)

B. MYTHOLOGY OF ANCIENT GREECE

· Gods of Ancient Greece (and Rome)

Zeus (Jupiter)

Hera (Juno) Ares (Mars)

Apollo (Apollo) Hermes (Mercury)

Artemis (Diana) Athena (Minerva)

Poseidon (Neptune) Hephaestus (Vulcan)

Aphrodite (Venus) Dionysus (Bacchus)

Eros (Cupid) Hades (Pluto)

· Mount Olympus: home of the Gods

· Mythological creatures and characters

Atlas (holding the world on his shoulders)

centaurs

Cerberus

Pegasus

Pan

· Greek Myths

Prometheus (how he brought fire from the gods to men)

Pandora’s Box

Oedipus and the Sphinx

Theseus and the Minotaur

Daedalus and Icarus

Arachne the Weaver

Swift-Footed Atalanta

Demeter and Persephone

Hercules (Heracles) and the Labors of Hercules

C. AMERICAN FOLK HEROES AND TALL TALES

Paul Bunyan

Johnny Appleseed

John Henry

Pecos Bill

Casey Jones

C. LITERARY TERMS

myth

tall tale

limerick

IV. SAYINGS AND PHRASES

Back to the drawing board.

Better late than never.

Cold Feet.

Don’t cry over spilled milk.

Don’t judge a book by its cover.

Easier said than done.

Eaten out of house and home.

Get a taste of your own medicine.

Two heads are better than one.

In hot water.

Keep your fingers crossed.

Practice what you preach.

Get up on the wrong side of the bed.

Turn over a new leaf.

Where there’s a will, there’s a way.

You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.