As students become more sophisticated writers, they begin to understand that words have different “jobs” in a sentence. These jobs can be thought of as parts of speech. In this word study unit, students will learn about the work that transition words, prepositions, verbs, adverbs and adjectives do. Students will also explore how certain kinds of words work together, like verbs and adverbs.

Sentences are the building blocks of paragraphs. A sentence is a complete thought that can stand alone and in this unit students will learn what comprises a complete sentence and how to identify a fragment, or incomplete sentence. They will explore different kinds of sentences and how to punctuate them. And, to sharpen their craft, students will learn how to spice up their own writing by adding sentence pattern variety.

When students learn the patterns and structures of words they become word wizards! They are able to more fluently convert a word from one part of speech to another, adjust the meaning, or translate a word from singular to plural (or vice versa). In this set of activities students will build on their knowledge of word structure and practice adding prefixes and suffixes, changing tenses and using contractions.

In this unit, students are encouraged to write letters to family and friends about a book they are reading. In the letters the will apply the skills learned in this unit, including how to structure a letter, punctuating titles of books and short stories, using possessives (in reference to the characters or ideas in the book), contractions and addressing an envelope. Don’t forget to request a response - getting a personal letter in the mail in this electronic age can be a thrill!

Verbs do a lot of the heavy lifting in good writing. Understanding the different kinds of verbs and how they are used enables students to write more compellingly. Students will explore how tenses work and how they must agree with and sometimes work together with other words in the sentence. Students will also learn about adverbs, the "sister" part of speech that enhance, or modify, verbs.

Letter writing is a very engaging and authentic way to learn formatting, punctuation and grammar. The activities in this unit should be learned in tandem with actual letter writing to aunts, uncles or other special far-away people. That way, students can learn and practice the letter writing skills and then apply them in their own letters. It would be especially rich to include their thoughts about books they are reading.

Second grade phonics covers more advanced rules that build upon kids' foundational reading skills, such as vowel pairs (ai, ee, ea, oo), long and short vowels, and the silent E. This guided lesson covers these three areas in order to enhance kids' skills with decoding more challenging texts. You can boost reading fluency further by printing the phonics worksheets that go with this lesson.