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Our primary classroom instruction has been undergoing change over the last few years. Gone are the days when reading, writing, and spelling were considered as separate and discrete units of study and instruction. Our children come to Second grade having learned to decode and make meaning of text. As early, and then emergent readers, they have developed an excitement about the reading experience.
During Second grade, children move into the Transitional phase. They are not struggling readers, but instead, they are readers who need new strategies for handling the more complex texts they will encounter both in and out of school. Science and Social Studies concepts are taught not only as content subjects, but also as nonfiction text forms.
To define the Transitional reader can be difficult. While they are capable of doing many things, they have gaps that show up. They still need support to make sense of the more difficult materials they are reading.
Karen Szymusiak and Franki Sibberson, in their book Beyond Leveled Books (2001), have identified six area of skill development in which the Transitional reader needs direct instruction.
- Learning to Select Appropriate Books - They often choose books that are either too easy or too hard. Transitional readers sometimes spend a long time picking a book and often waste time reading books that turn out to be not appropriate given their skills or interests. Teachers often see these readers wandering aimlessly in front of the bookcases. They have failed to make a good choice and quickly return for another book.
- Sustaining Comprehension - These students struggle with monitoring their comprehension, so when faced with reading a longer text they often lose comprehension as they continue to read. Because their monitoring strategies are not as sophisticated as the books they are reading, they often push forward, continuing to read the text (decoding the words), but never stopping to think about what they are reading. They frequently get to the end of a chapter and cannot recollect what they have just read.
- Maintaining Interest over an Entire Book - Early or emergent readers take up books that are simple and brief. As children move into longer texts, they need to develop persistence in their reading. Only then can they maintain interest in a text long enought to complete it and understand what they have read.
- Understanding Many Genres - Transitional readers may enjoy feeling comfortable in their reading and may therefore be reluctant to explore new genres. They revisit books they have read before, they read books that the teacher has shared with the class, or they may limit their choice of books to those that are similar to the ones they have already read. They need experience with a variety of genres, texts, and authors.
- Decoding and Fluency Skills - Many transitional readers are skilled at decoding but still need to develop more sophistication as they read texts with more complex vocabulary. They are ready to look more closely at the structure of words and patterns in language. While many of them have developed decoding skills, they may need to become more fluent in their reading. As texts become more complex, children need instruction to support their fluency.
- Using Text Features - As transitional readers move from simple books to a wider range of reading material, they encounter texts with new structures and features, and they often lack the strategies they need to make sense of these more challenging texts. As plots become more complicated, the number of characters increases, and issues of changing time and place become more prevalent in the books they are reading. Transitional readers struggle with comprehension. As they encounter nonfiction texts, they struggle with the variety of ways content is presented (text, graphs, pictures, tables, charts) and how to find relevant information.
As children move beyond the early stages of reading, we should provide books that support them in moving toward more independent reading and complex comprehension skills rather than moving them higher and higher and faster and faster.
As children are encouraged to use their new startegies to become active readers, so too are they encouraged to look at books as a writer. Through Writer's Workshop, our children learn the stages of the writing process: prewriting (planning), drafting, revising, editing, and publishing.
We help the children understand that a writer's main job is to find a good idea, and focus on a small moment, moving away from writing in a listlike fashion. They learn how to let their own voice shine in their writing and create vivid images through word choice and sentence fluency (elaboration with phrases and clauses). They become more focused on the importance of conventions (standardized spellings, capitalization, punctuation, and grammar). Importance is placed on reading and spelling high frequency words correctly all the time. No longer does spelling stand alone.
In today's classroom, it is difficult to tell where reading ends and writing begins. As readers, we enjoy the author's story, and as writiers, we learn to understand how books are written, so we can write our own books that readers will want to read.
Things have also changed in the area of mathematics. Over the course of the year we will cover mathematical concepts in the areas of:
- Number Concepts
- Addition and Subtraction with and without regrouping
- Geometry
- Fractions
- Measurement
- Probability
- Multiplication and Division readiness
- Graphs
- Money and Time
Second graders need to have easy and quick recall of addition and subtraction facts to 18. If your child does not yet have these facts at his/her command, please make a point of working on a few of these facts each night. Second grade children still need adult help and support to accomplish this. With continued practice, your child will master these facts quickly.
As adults, our mathematics instruction was almost totally an exercise in correct calculation. Today's children experience mathematics from a conceptual and problem solving perspective. Our children are expected to be able to calculate correctly (thus the need for quick and accurate fact recall) and then engage the mathematical concept in a problem solving format 60%-70% of our instructional time.
Our children might just as easily be asked not only the correct answer, but how the problem is solved (selecting and explaining a correct equation), or to find several correct solutions. They are expected to be able to justify the correctness of their answers, or possibly explain how an incorrectly solved problem could be corrected. They should be able to translate data in various graph formats.
Our class instruction supports children as they are learning to handle all of these situations. It's a joy to watch them learn to think mathematically and then apply their thinking to new situations.
By the end of the year, you will be amazed at the growth your child has made. Second grade is a wonderful year for children. They will add to the beginning stragegies they learned in Kindergarten and First grade and blossom as more capable and independent learners.
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