Our Language Arts Curriculum includes areas such as reading, writing, spelling, grammar, and handwriting.

Reading

This year students will continue to acquire decoding skills that will help them read more challenging books.  In order to accomplish this we will focus on long and short vowels, digraphs and diphthongs, beginning and ending blends, and vowels pairs.

Students will be introduced to additional reading concepts including contractions, compound words, nouns, verbs, adjectives, synonyms, antonyms, and homonyms.  We will also work on building our vocabulary and using dictionaries. 

Students will learn to identify the plot, characters, and events of a story.  We will also learn to retell story events while focusing on beginning, middle, and endings, as well as identifying the main idea of stories. 

Writing

Students will be introduced to the writing process which focuses on first drafts, revision, and final drafts.  Capitals and punctuation in each sentence will be expected.  The importance of organizing stories into beginning, middle, and end will also be emphasized.  This year students will be expected to incorporate more nouns, verbs, and adjectives into their writing to help make their stories and answers more interesting and meaningful.  Students will also gain experience in writing friendly letters, poetry, personal narratives, and fictional stories. 

In 2nd grade there is a greater emphasis for students to self-correct their written work with fewer reminders from adults and teachers.

 

Spelling

For the fifth year, our students will continue with Rebecca Sitton's spelling program.  This program spends 4-7 days on skill building and 1 day on testing.  This program breaks away from the traditional spelling tests each Friday.  The words that are studied are tested throughout the school year, in tests and in all written work provided by our students.  We'll discuss more specific details regarding our spelling program during our Back-To-School Night on September 16th.

 

Handwriting

This year we will work from a Zaner Bloser handwriting book. For students that require additional practice a link will be set up for extra worksheets.  Practice makes permanent!     

  

.  Grammar

This year we are so fortunate to work from a sensational resource.  The World of Language is a textbook that helps to introduce and give students practice using all parts of speech.  The textbook also emphasises how to weave these parts of speech into our writing.  There will plenty of opportunities to practice writing fictional stories, poetry, friendly letters, and writing reports.  The textbook also helps to reinforce the importance of self-editing.