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.

Sight words are commonly founds words that are not easy to decode because they don't follow set phonics rules (and must be learned by sight). Examples of sight words commonly found in first grade texts are would, thank, rain, and should. This guided lesson introduces first grader readers to even more sight words to help boost their comprehension and fluency.

Words are like legos - they can have interchangeable parts. In this unit students will study the construction of words including roots, prefixes and suffixes. Students will also explore how to modify words to make them possessive, a different part of speech and adjust to signify singular and plural. Understanding the basic building blocks of words, will increase students’ vocabulary, improve their spelling and add strategies for decoding unfamiliar words.

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.