English Language Arts

About this course

Second grade finishes phonics and starts building a writer. The phonics unit moves past the silent-e rule into long vowel teams (ai, ay, ea, ee, oa, ow, ue, ew), r-controlled vowels, diphthongs, silent letters such as kn, wr, and gn, hard and soft c and g, splitting two-syllable words, and the first prefixes and suffixes. Grammar covers common and proper nouns, plurals and possessives, action and linking verbs, verb tense, subject-verb agreement, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, prepositional phrases, and compound sentences. Writing turns from single sentences to real paragraphs, taught with a topic sentence, two or three supporting details, and a closing sentence, then applied to narrative, descriptive, opinion, and how-to writing, letters, and an editing checklist. Comprehension is taught strategy by strategy, including inference, compare and contrast, character change, theme, point of view, summarizing, and fact versus opinion. There is also a literature unit that treats Genesis, Moses, the Psalms, and the parables of Jesus as literature alongside Aesop's fables, a research unit that walks all the way from choosing a topic to citing a source, and a unit on listening, speaking, and presenting.

The course is 216 lessons across 16 units. Fifteen units hold 12 lessons each at about 40 minutes; the sixteenth is a 36-week spelling sequence. A typical lesson is a page you work through together: the concept explained in plain words with worked examples, questions to ask, a sorting or reading activity, a KJV verse tied to the day's idea, a parent note, and a short homework task. Every regular lesson ends with a ten-question multiple-choice quiz that grades itself. The spelling weeks work differently: each has ten words on a theme, and your student types each one into a sentence with the word missing rather than choosing from options. The sequence starts at short-vowel words such as cat and bed and ends the year at daughter, beautiful, important, and remember, which is a fair picture of the year's arc.

Your student should come in able to decode short-vowel words and read a simple sentence independently. The reading level of the lessons themselves is still above a second grader, so plan to read them aloud. One thing to plan around: seven of the sixteen units are exact repeats of earlier ones. Phonics, vocabulary, comprehension, grammar, writing, literature, and research each appear twice with identical lessons, which means 84 of the 216 lessons are review of ground already covered. That second pass is genuinely useful for a student who needs the repetition, but if the material stuck the first time you can move through it quickly and spend the days elsewhere.

What the course covers

• Vowel teams, diphthongs, r-controlled vowels, and silent letters
• Prefixes, suffixes, root words, and syllable splitting
• Homophones, multiple-meaning words, and dictionary skills
• Inference, theme, point of view, and summarizing
• Nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, and prepositions
• Subject-verb agreement, verb tense, and compound sentences
• Paragraph structure and the writing process
• Narrative, descriptive, opinion, how-to, and letter writing
• Bible literature: Genesis, Moses, Psalms, and the parables
• 36 weekly typed spelling quizzes, ten words each

What your student will be able to do

• Decode multisyllable words using vowel teams, prefixes, and suffixes
• Draw an inference from text clues and name the evidence behind it
• Label the parts of speech in a sentence and keep subject and verb in agreement
• Write a complete paragraph with topic sentence, details, and closing
• Revise a draft using an editing checklist
• Spell 360 grade-level words correctly by typing them from memory

Scope and sequence

All 16 units of English Language Arts for Grade 2, in the order they are taught.

Every lesson, by title

All 216 lesson titles are listed here — nothing is withheld until you download. Open a unit to read its contents.

One whole lesson, exactly as it comes

This is a real lesson taken from the middle of the course — the teaching text, the practice, the homework, and the first three quiz questions with their answers. It is not a marketing excerpt.

What you will need

Drawn from the materials named across all 216 lessons of this course. Most families already own most of it.