Introduction to 2^nd Grade

Students in grade 2 strengthen their foundational and critical reading skills to proficiently read increasingly complex literary and informational texts with fluency and understanding. They ask and answer relevant questions by using text evidence, summarizing, and engaging in collaborative conversations. Students identify literary elements such as character, setting, author’s purpose, and structure. Students in grade 2 continue to practice the writing process by writing narrative, informative, and opinion pieces. They expand their grade-level vocabularies, including synonyms, antonyms, and words with Anglo-Saxon roots, and apply their knowledge of those words as they communicate through speaking and writing. Students write both simple and compound declarative, interrogative, imperative, and exclamatory sentences, and they use the correct end marks for each. Students use apostrophes when writing contractions, commas when writing dates, and colons when writing time. Students in grade 2 understand texts more clearly with the aid of graphic and text features, and use that understanding to find and share relevant information independently or in a group. Students express themselves through different combinations of multimodal content and develop stamina for longer periods of reading and writing.

Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is a research-based framework for improving student learning experiences and outcomes through careful instructional planning focused on the varied needs of all students, including students with visible and non-visible disabilities, advanced and gifted learners, and English learners.

Some general ideas for implementing the UDL lens in an ELA lesson, PK-12, are provided in this chart.

These exemplar lesson plans showcase best practices for English language arts. These lessons are aligned to the Oklahoma Academic Standards and bundle together multiple objectives to showcase the recursive nature of ELA. Each lesson plan includes helpful explanations about the instructional plan and steps. Teachers can review these sample lessons on their own, with a colleague, and/or with their professional learning community, to reflect on the highlighted ELA practices and how they mesh with their own current classroom practices.

Lesson plans are available for each grade featuring texts from the following genres: fiction, nonfiction, & poetry.

Moreover, an exemplar lesson plan sequence regarding Standard 6 research is available for each grade band.

This suite of writing resources includes:

• student-friendly checklists for the narrative, informative, argumentative, and research modes
• editing checklists for the beginning and middle of the school year
• examples of teacher feedback on student writing
• a peer feedback lesson plan with a slideshow and handout

• Engagement Strategies
• Family Guide
  
• 2nd Grade ELA Standards (pages 34-43)