Physical Education, Art, Music, Guidance, Library, and Spanish are also included in second grade. Weekly word lists are used from the county adopted spelling series. They emphasize phonics such as vowel pairs and spelling patterns and rules. This includes sentences, proper nouns, dates, book titles, plurals and possessives, and letter parts. Also, students are taught to identify subjects and predicates.
Students write daily in shared journals and in their homework as they summarize their reading.
Emphasis is on good sentence structure and descriptive and narrative paragraphs with strong beginning and concluding sentences. Using the basal reading text and novels, students are taught comprehension skills such as main idea, predicting outcomes cause and effect, drawing conclusions, fact and opinion, and summarizing. Phonics and vocabulary work are also taught, emphasizing the use of context clues and word parts such as prefixes and suffixes. Finally, the Reading Renaissance program gives meaningful practice with reading by using Accelerated Reader books and quizzes and setting individual student goals. By the end of third grade, students should be competent in addition, subtraction, one digit multiplication, one digit division, and in solving word problems using these computation skills.