What Your Child Will Learn in Calvert's Second Grade Course

Reading

Reviewing word analysis techniques, long vowels, digraphs, consonant clusters, vowel pairs, blends, and r-controlled vowels; developing comprehension skills; building strategies for comparing, contrasting, predicting, inferring, and drawing conclusions; identifying cause and effect; summarizing; recognizing topics, main ideas, and details; reading appealing anthologies and phonics library book of stories; developing critical thinking skills

Writing/Composition

Practicing Calvert Script as reinforcement of learning to read; writing dictated words and sentences; writing compositions; practicing spelling and vocabulary; learning rules of punctuation

Mathematics

Featuring Calvert Math. Adding and subtracting 2- and 3-digit numbers; money; patterns in addition and subtraction; measuring weight, capacity, and temperature; problem-solving strategies; telling time in 5-minute increments; 2- and 3-dimensional geometric figures; fractions; sets; introducing multiplication and division

Science

Developing natural curiosity; questioning, investigating, experimenting; studying changes in animals, plants, Earth, environment; sound and light; heart, lungs, health; heat, air, weather; Earth and the Sun; forces, machines, levers, magnets; properties of rocks, minerals

Social Studies

Exploring original read-aloud narratives that include biographies of legendary Old World figures, explorers, inventors, and leaders in American life, as well as accounts of famous events (Paul Revere’s ride, fall of the Berlin Wall); investigating the five themes of geography, compass direction, maps, symbols, globes, continents, relative and exact locations, boundaries, and regions; extending the fundamentals of American civics and government (cooperation, accountability, conflict resolution, patriotism); examining the economic concepts of goods and services, income, scarcity of resources, markets, and banking; activities included

Technology

Application lessons, activities, and online interactive learning tool integrated with curriculum: keyboarding; introduction to touch typing; word processing basics; introduction to spreadsheets; using e-mail and the Internet; beginning database skills; visual mapping. Internet activities integrated with Reading and Science texts.

Art

Developing new skills in drawing; studying famous paintings