Your Child's Communication: 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