In second grade, Moses Brown students are becoming confident and engaged readers, writers, speakers, and listeners. Some students are learning to read, while others are beginning to read for learning. These skills grow at different rates in every child, and we regularly assess students’ progress to ensure they’re getting the right level of challenge to grow and feel successful.
Students are taught specific strategies for decoding words, and begin to develop deeper comprehension, increased fluency, and critical responses to text. At every step, our teachers focus on nurturing children’s passion for a lifetime of joyful reading and writing.
With daily read-aloud time, second graders practice recognizing genre characteristics, making predictions, drawing conclusions, mapping plot and character development, recognizing figurative language, making connections, asking questions, visualizing, making inferences, and transforming their thinking. They are taught to ask both literal and inferential comprehension questions, and to self-select books that hold personal interest and are written at appropriate reading levels.
They then demonstrate both their reading and theatrical skills in the Greek Myths Readers’ Theater, when second graders assume the roles of gods and goddesses for a dramatic reading of these timeless stories.
Writing workshop helps children gain a sense of themselves as writers as they observe the world and reflect on their experiences. By recognizing and emulating the literary techniques of favorite authors, students “grow” a piece of writing by generating and organizing ideas, drafting, revising, editing, and publishing a humorous story from their home life. We then invite parents, relatives, and friends to a reading of these funny (and revealing) tales.
Students keep a journal throughout the year, drawing and writing about their experiences with increasing detail and sophistication. This collection provides a delightful chronicle of the year at school and at home.Inquire