The Basics:
In math, students extend their understanding of place valu🍸e to the hundreds place. They use this to solve word problems, such as those involving length and other units of measure. Students add and subtract numbers up to 20 and learn more about numbers up to 100. They lay a foundation for fractions by work♎ing with shapes.
In English, students think, talk and write about what they read in a variety of texts, such as stories, books, articles and other☂ sources. In writing, students learn how to develop a topic and practice editing and revising their work.
Inside the classroom: English
Courtney Yadoo, 2nd grade lead teacher, Success Academy Bensonhurst
We emphasℱize close, analytical reading, the most important of the Common Core literacy standards. We spend a lot of time on close reading to determine the author’s point of view and biases. We ask questions of the students that push them to thi🍸nk deeply about what they read. We think critically about craft and structure: the moves an author makes in the text, information the writer includes or leaves out, the different voices and perspectives presented in a piece of writing.
For example, during a unit about the Pilgrims, we discuss how certain texts include more information about the Wampanoag than others, and how through either omission or inclusion of information, the author can influence what we 🐽think about a topic or event.
Second grade is a particularly critical time in literacy, because if a child is not fluent in 🍸reading by 3rd grade, that child is likely to struggle academically for years to come. The Common Core standards support that effort because they include a broad range of genres — fiction, nonfiction, poetry. Before the Common Core, many clas🗹srooms focused solely on fiction, denying students exposure to other means of written expression. Now, students can choose readings that interest them in any genre and still make progress toward meeting the standards.
Another Common Core standard we are passionate about involves verbal communication and self-expression. We emphasize discussion in 🐼all our lessꦍons — collaborative conversations, turning and talking to their partners about the text, explaining their points of view, and then agreeing or disagreeing. To do this, they must really listen to each other and be able to communicate their ideas out loud, clearly and comprehensively.
The Common Core calls for students to be exposed to a range of🅺 reading levels and text complexity. By hearing harder texts read aloud, discussing them, and listening to how their peers think about them, the children are exposed to a wide💟r range of writings more difficult than those they could read and comprehend on their own.
Much of what we do in class is transferable to the home, and we encourage parents to r🐠ead with their children, to discuss how the characters present themselves 📖and how they change over the course of a story. They may not realize that they’re helping their children meet the Common Core standards, but they are.
Sample lesson:
Over a span of four sessions, students read books, watch videos, and hear readings about Arctic anim𝐆als and animal babies. They then write an informational booklet about one of the animals featured in these materials. The report should group information into thematic sections — such as where the animal lives, the foods it eats, and its predators — to present facts from the sources. It must include an introduction, table of contents, conclusion, and a glossary of key vocabulary words.
Inside the classroom: Math
Corey Inslee, 2nd grade teacher, Success Academy Harlem 1
In 2nd grade, students need to learn to manipulate numbers in more sophisticated ways. They already have the foundation because they know that large numbers are made up of small numbers. The number 26, for example, is made up of two 10s and six 1s. When they want to add 26 and 32, instead of employing a rote operation and getting lost in 1s andℱ 10s columns, they can see that they can take all the 10s — two from 26 and three from 32 — and combine them into five 10s, and then combine the 2 and the 6. That approach will help them solve far more difficult problems in 3rd grade and beyond.
The Common Core also stresses flexibility of strategy. Because they have a strong number sense, students can come up with all sorts of c𓆏reative and efficient ways to solve problems and arrive at the right answer. Rather than having teachers dictate how to solve the problem, the children themselves come up with strategies and then share them with the class. T🐠here may be three or four different approaches to solving a problem, all of them correct.
If a word problem asks the students toꦆ figure out how many tickets are being given away, some may use subtraction to find the answer, while others may start at the end of the problem and work backward by adding up. Discussing and comparing strategies 🌌— all of them valid — teaches children the importance of thinking critically and varying their thinking depending on the situation. It teaches them to be more than just rote-memorizing robots.
For teachers, the Common Core provides a clear trajectory of math thinking from year to year. It gives a framework that spells out where students need to be by the end of the year so they are prepared for 💮the next grade. We know what level the students have attained when they start the year, and we know where they need to go.
I sometimes get questions from parents about the way math is taught at Success, because the Common Core approach isn’t how they learned it. They look at the homework sheet and want to tell their kids to stack the numbers on top of each other, because that’s the way they did it. They learnedꦓ the rules, but they didn’t understand them.
But when these parents talk to the teachers and see that their kids have a deep understanding of numbers and how they relate to each other, they get it. And🍌 many of them even lﷺearn some new math skills themselves.
Sample lesson:
The number line is used as a tool to help students understand🐼 base 10 and to s🦩olve problems using addition and subtraction of numbers less than 100. The big idea is for students to understand and use groups of 10, and to practice applying the distributive, associative, and commutative properties.
In this task, students demonstrate the relationships between several two-digit numbers by placing them correctly on t𝔉he number line, then explain their reasoning in a sentence.
