2nd Grade Language Arts Planning

Language arts (LA) includes spelling, grammar, reading and writing.  K will be spending 2 hours completing the four-fold LA, here is a breakdown per component:

Spelling - 15 minutes
Grammar - 20 minutes
Reading - 30m 4th grade and above reading level books; 40-60m books below reading level
Writing - 10 minutes

We will keep a binder for LA with a section for each of the four components.  I've outlined some things I wanted to remember for this year with each subject:

Spelling - test spelling lists weekly and keep a list of trouble words and trouble rules;  K copies rules she has trouble with and reads them out loud; two times a week review trouble words and trouble rules.

Grammar - write down K's narrations and read it back to her; towards the middle of the school year she should be writing the first sentence down by herself;  Memorize 12 pieces.

Reading - oral reading for fluency once a week with McGuffey's Fourth Eclectic Reader;  two times per week K is to give me two to four sentences about the plot of the book she is reading for her challenging reading; no narrations on fun books; only filing her imaginative reading in this notebook - stories, myths, fairy tales, poems and novels; factual books and biography reading goes in history notebook.

We still review phonics from the OPGTR to make sure K grasped all the phonics rules and we will continue to review them occasionally.

Writing - practices cursive daily for 5 minutes; dictation daily using WWE 2; once a month writes penpals

With writing, it is not only a skill but a content area.  We are laying the foundation that makes a good writer, that is why I don't have my daughter doing creative writing until the logic stage.  I like how Susan Wise Bauer puts it "The creative writing is a natural gift; the ability to think through information, organize it, and put it down on paper needs to be taught."  Our writing program consists of:

1. Narration - in literature, history and science
2. Copywork
3. Dictation

K narrates twice a week from whatever book she is reading from her challenging list.  She also narrates as it comes up in the grammar book.  When we do our history chapter, she narrates to me.  Lastly, when we do science, she narrates to me after each lesson.  This year we will be concentrating on improving her narration to the point that she can identify the most important element or central thought of the passage.  She will also start dictation and she has already had some practice in dictation with small sentences out of All About Spelling.  By the end of 2nd grade, she should be able to write two long sentences from dictation after only two repetitions.