Preparing for Second Grade

Second Grade Readiness

Second grade is the year when teachers put the finishing touches on what was learned in kindergarten and first grades.  Kids are beginning to move from one developmental level ot another.  They are moving from concrete to more abstract thinking.  If you suspect your child is not on-level, now is the time to get help.  Interventionists through the school system and tutoring are good places to start.  It is vital at this point because the years that follow will depend on this base material being mastered.  If the base material is not mastered, chances are not in the favor of the student to be academically successful.  Also, WesTest will start in third grade in WV.  Those basics need to be implanted by the end of second grade so the child is not so overwhelmed by the amount of information covered in preparation for that test.

• 1
  Teach your child to write his first and last name correctly and legibly using appropriate capital and lower-case letters.
• 2
  Help your child learn to recite and write their home address and phone number.

• 3
  Make sure your child can read the first 100 basic sight words. Many free lists can be found on the Internet. Use your favorite search engine and type in "free sightword lists." Some websites offer sorted lists by grade level.
• 4
  Practice with your child so he can write numbers to 150 as well as count by 2s, 5s and 10s with little effort.  Make sure the child can order numbers correctly.  Twenty comes before thirty.  Nine comes after four.
• 5
  Teach your child to tell time to the hour, quarter hour, and half hour on both digital and analog clocks.
• 6
  Practice with your child until he can tell the names and values of the following coins: half dollar, quarter, nickel, dime and penny.  Practice counting mixed values of coins:  two dimes, one nickel, one quarter, and three pennies is 53 cents.  This is a very hard concept for kids to grasp.
• 7
  Make sure your child knows the days of the week and the months of the year in order, and knows the current month and year.
• 8
  Help your child practice addition and subtraction facts to 10. If the facts aren't memorized, the child should know of some way to solve them using a learned strategy, a number line or another way other than by counting on her fingers.  Also practice two digit addition with no carry over numbers (22 + 45 = ).  Make sure they comprehend place value (ones, tens, hundreds place).
• 9
  Read with your child. The more exposure to books a child gets, the better he is at reading and comprehending. One of the greatest gifts you can give your child is your time and a good book to read again and again.  I have a suggested book list for all ages following all of the blog posts.
• 10
  Make sure your child understands how to construct a sentence accurately.  They should use a noun/pronoun as the subject, a verb/auxilary verb for the predicate, start a sentence with a capital letter and end with a punctuation mark.  At this level statements that need a period and questions that need a question mark have been taught.