Welcome to our Grade 2 English Language Arts course, designed to align with the US Common Core Standards. This comprehensive course is structured into key sections, each focusing on essential literacy skills to enhance reading, writing, speaking, and listening abilities. Our curriculum encourages second graders to develop a deeper love for reading while building foundational skills in language arts.

1. Reading: Literature

• Key Ideas and Details: Students will learn to ask and answer such questions as who, what, where, when, why, and how to demonstrate understanding of key details in a text. They will also retell stories, including fables and folktales from diverse cultures, and determine their central message, lesson, or moral.
• Craft and Structure: Students will describe how words and phrases supply rhythm and meaning in a story, poem, or song. They will acknowledge differences in the points of view of characters, including by speaking in a different voice for each character when reading dialogue aloud.
• Integration of Knowledge and Ideas: Students will use information gained from the illustrations and words in a print or digital text to demonstrate understanding of its characters, setting, or plot.

2. Reading: Informational Text

• Key Ideas and Details: Students will identify the main topic of a multiparagraph text as well as the focus of specific paragraphs within the text. They will also describe the connection between a series of historical events, scientific ideas or concepts, or steps in technical procedures in a text.
• Craft and Structure: Learn to determine the meaning of words and phrases in a text relevant to a grade 2 topic or subject area.
• Integration of Knowledge and Ideas: Explain how specific images (e.g., a diagram showing how a machine works) contribute to and clarify a text.

3. Reading: Foundational Skills

• Phonics and Word Recognition: Distinguish long and short vowels when reading regularly spelled one-syllable words and know spelling-sound correspondences for additional common vowel teams.
• Fluency: Read with sufficient accuracy and fluency to support comprehension, including reading on-level text orally with accuracy, appropriate rate, and expression on successive readings.

4. Writing

• Text Types and Purposes: Write opinion pieces in which they introduce the topic or book they are writing about, state an opinion, supply reasons that support the opinion, use linking words to connect opinion and reasons, and provide a concluding statement.
• Production and Distribution of Writing: Focus on the writing process which includes prewriting, drafting, revising, editing, and publishing.
• Research to Build and Present Knowledge: Participate in shared research and writing projects (e.g., read a number of books on a single topic to produce a report; record science observations).

5. Speaking and Listening

• Comprehension and Collaboration: Participate in collaborative conversations with diverse partners about grade 2 topics and texts with peers and adults in small and larger groups.
• Presentation of Knowledge and Ideas: Add drawings or other visual displays to descriptions when appropriate to clarify ideas, thoughts, and feelings.

6. Language

• Conventions of Standard English: Demonstrate command of the conventions of standard English grammar and usage when writing or speaking.
• Knowledge of Language: Use knowledge of language and its conventions when writing, speaking, reading, or listening.
• Vocabulary Acquisition and Use: Determine or clarify the meaning of unknown and multiple-meaning words and phrases based on grade 2 reading and content, choosing flexibly from an array of strategies.

This course aims to cultivate not only a robust set of language arts skills but also a passion for literature, effective communication, and lifelong learning.