St. Mary School of Rockwood at 32447 Church St., Rockwood, MI 48173 US - Second Grade

Welcome to Second Grade! Second grade is a very busy and exciting year. Not only are second graders developing their academic and social skills, but they will also be making their First Reconciliation and First Communion this year. Our curriculum consists of the following: Each day in Math, the children participate in a wide variety of activities. We begin each day with calendar, then do a spiral review of information and skills from previous lessons including: counting, temperature, patterns, problem solving, and story problems. Students have “fact practice” every day. New lessons are presented through discussion and hands-on activities. In Handwriting, we will be reviewing manuscript skills and later in the year we will begin cursive writing. A new Spelling list will be sent home each Monday. A pre-test will be given each Wednesday and a final test will be given on Friday. If a student receives a 100% on the Wednesday pre-test, they will not need to take the Friday test. In Reading and Phonics, we are using the Houghton Mifflin reading program called Invitations to Literacy. In addition to the two texts, we have workbooks, tapes, and other materials that will assist your child in developing the skills needed to move on to third grade. Our phonics book is from Modern Curriculum Press. This is to strengthen skills for vowel and consonant sounds, blends, rhyming words, digraphs, diphthongs, contractions, compound words, synonyms, antonyms, and homonyms. The children also use a computer program called Lexia Phonics that reinforces our classroom topics. For Social Studies we focus on family ties, the Earth as our home, a working world, the role of people in a community, discovering our past, and special holidays. In English, we focus on types of sentences, speaking and listening skills, learning about words, writing letters, writing paragraphs, and stories, capitalization and punctuation, and writing book reports as part of our comprehensive English program. As an extension of the curriculum, some of the activities we will be doing this year include:

• First Reconciliation
• First Communion
• field trips
• writing projects with the seventh grade
• hands on projects in social studies
• hands on experiments in science
• present a classroom play
• a study in poetry and write a collection of their own work

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