Second Grade

By the end of second grade your child should be able to do the following:

Listening

• Follow 3-4 oral directions in a sequence
• Understand direction words (e.g., location, space, and time words)
• Correctly answer questions about a grade-level story

Speaking

• Be easily understood
• Answer more complex “yes/no” questions
• Ask and answer “wh” questions (e.g., who, what, where, when, why)
• Use increasingly complex sentence structures
• Clarify and explain words and ideas
• Give directions with 3-4 steps
• Use oral language to inform, to persuade, and to entertain
• Stay on topic, take turns, and use appropriate eye contact during conversation
• Open and close conversation appropriately

Reading

• Have fully mastered phonics/sound awareness
• Associate speech sounds, syllables, words, and phrases with their written forms
• Recognize many words by sight
• Use meaning clues when reading (e.g., pictures, titles/headings, information in the story)
• Reread and self-correct when necessary
• Locate information to answer questions
• Explain key elements of a story (e.g., main idea, main characters, plot)
• Use own experience to predict and justify what will happen in grade-level stories
• Read, paraphrase/retell a story in a sequence
• Read grade-level stories, poetry, or dramatic text silently and aloud with fluency
• Read spontaneously
• Identify and use spelling patterns in words when reading

Writing

• Write legibly
• Use a variety of sentence types in writing essays, poetry, or short stories (fiction and nonfiction)
• Use basic punctuation and capitalization appropriately
• Organize writing to include beginning, middle, and end
• Spell frequently used words correctly
• Progress from inventive spelling (e.g., spelling by sound) to more accurate spelling