The Second Grade Curriculum of Barnard follows the NY Common Core State Standards. Our instruction offers a curriculum plan dedicated to ensure that each child understands and is able to demonstrate mastery in grade level skills.
Reading: Second grade reading curriculum is based on the Readers Workshop Model. Our 90 minute literacy block of instruction is created to engage and expose students to literature and fictional text. We build reading skills and strategies to develop children's literal and inferential comprehension. Through reading they are responding to literature, developing vocabulary skills, and building foundational skills. The genres we explore consist of: Fiction, Folktales, Non-Fiction (Informational), Biographies, Poetry, Realistic Fiction. Our goal is to inspire a love for reading and give children a chance to interact with text beyond the pages of a book!
Writing: Writers Workshop is a 45 minute block that correlates with the reading work done in Readers Workshop. Conventions, vocabulary, language concepts, the Six-Trait Writing Model, writing genres, and the writing process are components used to guide children from the role of beginning writers to becoming published authors.
Math: Math is taught as a workshop model that offers children experience and opportunities to understand and demonstrate math concepts. A mini-lesson, direct instruction, guided practice, independent practice, partner work and group sharing of strategies and concepts learned are part of the 60 minute block. A hands-on approach is favored to provide students with a strong foundation on place value, operations and number sense, beginning algebra, problem-solving, time, money, measurement, graphing and geometry.
Social Studies: Community is the focus of our children's learning. Our instruction builds from learning about family, classroom and local community issues to world issues. The children are engaged in current events through literature and informational classroom magazines. Economics, Government, Citizenship, Geography and History are some of the topics covered.
Science: The children are involved in learning the Life, Physical, and Earth sciences through classroom projects and experiments, individual and partner work, informational text, and research, writing and reporting skills.
We believe in fostering a curriculum that is differentiated, balanced, interactive, and instruction based. Our commitment to the students is to develop independent and life-long learners, as well as nurturing, caring citizens.