Giving Back: Grade 2 Overview

Our copy of the beloved book The Seven Year Old Wonder Book

In keeping with a recent post on wanting to help other families put together a syllabus for a Waldorf-inspired curriculum, I will now delve into Grade 2 (My post on grade 1 can be found here).

 I may add to and/or edit this post as time goes along, especially since we will be doing grade 2 in the fall and will likely find other great online resources to help us throughout the year. Everything I am listing here is being offered free of charge for educational purposes for other families. My hope is that, whether or not you can afford a boxed curriculum, can only afford to buy a few of the individual books in any given boxed curriculum, or whether you'd just prefer to cobble your own curriculum together yourselves for a more personalized one, I hope this information can give you a good jumping-off point in your lesson planning.

This will be a very long post, so grab a cuppa and settle in.

OK, without further ado I'll dive right in.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Oak Meadow

This information is freely offered at the Oak Meadow website. 

Here's a copy of the Grade 2 Overview they currently have pictured:

There is also a page on the site that gives some links to some of the lessons in the curriculum, from which you could create your own lessons on those topics if you desired.

--------------------------------------------

Eugene Schwartz 

I believe I found the following information from the Facebook group The Waldorf Files. To the best of my knowledge, this is offered freely by Eugene Schwartz to prospective teachers and parents:

Second Grade Main Lesson Block Rotations
Eugene Schwartz, class teacher

--------------------------------------------

September 5 – September 28    Saints’ Stories / Lower Case Letters

October 1 – October 19    Arithmetic

October 22 – November 9    Form Drawing / Fables

November 13 – November 30    Arithmetic

December 3 – December 21    Saints’ Stories

January 7 – January 25    Arithmetic

January 28 – February 15    Form Drawing / Fables

February 25 – March 15    Saints’ Stories

March 18 – March 27    Arithmetic

April 8 – May 3    Form Drawing / Fables

May 6 – May 17    Saints’ Stories

May 20 – May 24    Work on Class Play

SECOND GRADE MAIN LESSON BLOCKS

    In last year’s curriculum report I attempted to describe in great detail the foundations of our work, which in essence hold true for the first three years in the Waldorf Lower School.  This year my descriptions, building upon last year’s details will be shorter but I trust equally informative.

    The children make a great leap from First to Second Grade, perhaps one of the biggest leaps in their school career.  Writing, which was virtually an extension of drawing in Grade One, now stands on its own; numbers, whose qualitative aspect was stressed last year, now are recognized as quantities, extending in space and time.  And the world of Fairy Tales, although not completely absent, now makes way for the Lives of the Saints – biographies of men and women with an historical verity – and fables.

    If the circle is a picture of First Grade, all whole and unified, each part sustaining the rest, the Second Grade may be seen as two parallel lines.  For the child is no longer carried by the dreamy sense of security in all that encircles him, but begins to experience a delicate quality of “apartness”, of “identity”.  At this age, criticalness may suddenly appear, along with a tendency to squabble endlessly, or feel persecuted by “everybody”, bereft of friends.  The Fables point out the foibles suddenly appearing all over; the Saints’ legends calm, console and reassure.

Writing and Reading
 (16 weeks)

    The first block rapidly brought to the class all of the “small” letters, whose larger counterparts took most of Grade One to learn.  A great deal of stress was placed on correct proportions, with the children using a self-drawn colored guide to help them in the first months of their writing.  By mid-year they wrote without the guiding spaces.  Most of the children’s work now shows a good sense for the relative proportions of the letters and a good eye for keeping each line of writing straight.  It is my intention that for the rest of their years in the Lower School the children will never have to revert to using “liners” to keeping their writing straight.  The class worked on two Main Lesson books at this time, “Vowels” and the “Book of Saints.”

    As we began using our readers, the children were asked to write and read longer sentences, learning a little about punctuation, capitalization, etc.  “St. Brendan” arises out of this winter work, while “Belling the Cat” marks the class’s introduction to pencils as writing tools.  This latter book was also the first composed by the class itself.  Sentences were suggested by a child, emended by others, and finally written by me on the board.  Their last book, “St. Francis,” is also the longest and required work that was exceedingly careful.

    Reading work was done almost exclusively out of our own reader, “The Sun-Filled Cave.”  Beginning with poems already known by the children, we read aloud as a class until various children were able to identify various words, and, in time, recognize them in new contexts.  Over the year reading has been done in a very low-key and non-pressured atmosphere, for at this age it is less important that the children begin to read right away than that they become certain that, in time, they will  be reading.  For those who simply come to reading sooner, a number of books were always available which they could read aloud to their friends, or to themselves.  Our little “St. Brendan Game” also included a very basic reading vocabulary which most children learned.  An unexpected supplement to our reading work came about when a number of children asked to copy out their play parts and “study” them.  Since most of the children already knew their lines by heart this actually became something of an additional reading exercise for them.

    In Second Grade, Recitation remains the heart of our class work.  Several hundred lines of poetry, including our play, “The Fire on Tara” were learned by heart, played as games or simply recited by the children.  As in Grade One, much of this poetry was specially written for the children, but Emily Bronte, W. B. Yeats and Wordsworth were also represented in our poems.  The re-telling of fable and saints’ lives also developed poise and verbal skill as well as the growing power of memory.

Arithmetic
(16 weeks)

    Great stress was laid this year on coming to know the Multiplication tables up to 12 x 12, both through recitation and writing, and developing some facility with the Four Processes of Addition, Subtraction, Multiplication and Division that were first learned last year.

    The times tables, in the experience of my colleagues, are a learning challenge that must be tackled anew every year until Grade Eight.  This year we worked a lot with clapping them out so that a regular rhythm was established, i.e.,
    One, two, clap, four, five, clap, seven, eight, clap, etc.

Going through the tables backwards also strengthens memorization, and they were made the basis of various “concentration games” some of which I have demonstrated at Parent Meetings.  However creatively or playfully they are approached, however, the tables are eventually learned by rote and through constant drilling.

    Work with the Four Processes brought in larger quantities of countable objects, and a stress on the relationship between the processes – e.g. multiplication as an extension of addition, division as a faster subtraction.  Problems to be solved by division, for example, were always of a social nature, so that rather than becoming an activity divorced from life, work with numbers is taught as a skill completely involved with practical life.  The “St. Brendan Game” was designed as a means of giving the children further experience in subtraction and addition.  For a number of weeks it was at the center of our recess activity.
Form Drawing
(6 weeks of blocks; 1x week all year)

    In the portfolio of Form Drawings your child has brought home you will see over 30 examples of the year’s work.  In the first two years of school, Form Drawing is possibly the most important activity undertaken by the children, and I hope you will look at these deceptively simple drawings in detail.

   These forms are an invaluable aid to me in determining potential form-perception problems, and as the children practice form drawing over the months, such work helps to solve or at least mitigate these same problems.

--------------------------------------------------

Enki

The curriculum items for the Grade 2 package are located at this link. From here, you can look at individual books and get an idea what topics they recommend, which include Four Processes, Skip Counting, Place Value, and if you look at the cover of their Grade 2 math book, you'll see a suggestion for Counting by Tens. There is a sample page located here of a story called The Kingdom of Jewel (a place value story).

--------------------------------------------------

Live Education

Here is the link to the books that go with the Live Education grade 2 curriculum. As with the grade 1 curriculum, you can glean quite a bit by looking at the individual books to see the table of contents and sample info. What I don't like about Live Ed. is that it seems that you must buy the entire packaged curriculum, rather than having the option of simply purchasing individual books. Having said that, the curriculum looks quite nice. 

-----------------------------------------------------

Christopherus

Here is the link to the Grade 2 overview for the Christopherus curriculum. 

According to their website (quoted below) 

Second Grade Package includes:

• Second Grade Syllabus ( 400 pages, in a 3-ring binder )
• Second Grade Mathematics
• Animal Legends
• Saints and Heroes

Please note that the following books which are available separately and as part of the First Grade Curriculum, remain essential components of second grade :

• Joyful Movement
• Form Drawing for Beginners
• Learning About the World Through Modeling

I *LOVE that the Christopherus curriculum allows you to purchase the books individually. I also love that the books are very reasonably priced. As you can see, the topics are pretty much the same across the board as you find in the other curriculum publisher's options I've included in this post.

---------------------------------------------

The following was also offered by a group member on the Facebook group Waldorf Files:

There are many free resources there and I have articles and such on how to create your very own curriculum! You can do it! Get these books ready: 

The King of Ireland' s Son (read it aloud, then read it again! Get it used on eBay) {or find a free copy online)

An Aesop's Tales Volume can be internet

A Jataka Tales resource can be internet

Purchase the Saints volume from Rudolf Steiner College about $15

To add to the fun, get Anna Comstock Bledsoe' s Handbook of Nature, free on the internet, use it with the fables to tell a little cute story or poem or something about the animals in the fables....

I suggest one more book: Active Arithmetic wonderful resource

With these things, you can go a long ways. You do not really need the saints book if you will focus on Francis, Patrick, Columba, and a couple others from the 1400s or earlier. I do a whole month on Francis, great reading out there and great stories, plenty for a month.

For math, you can create a little imagination and teach:
Borrowing and carrying
Columnar adding and subtracting
Tables 1-12 (as far as you can go)

Of course you will also have
painting
crafts
knitting (lamb, flute case, rainbow ball, other items like slippers )
flute playing
singing
reading
spelling basic words
word families (50 plus, sounds and combination of sounds)

So you can plan 3 blocks of Saints, 2 blocks of Fables, 2-3 blocks of Math, and 1 Nature Block.
Science in grade two is cooking, kitchen chemistry. That is about 9 blocks of learning, enough to take you from September to end of May, then review it all in June.

Teach lower case if you have not in the beginning of the year and start cursive writing at the end of the year.

Form drawing once a week *symmetry and mirror drawings this year, and painting once a week.

Don't forget outdoor play, gardning, good deed day, and social time! 2nd graders are so much fun.