If you’re homeschooling your child through 2nd grade, it’s essential to ensure she’s ready for the challenges ahead. After all, who doesn’t want their kid to be successful? But where do you start? Here are five ways to prepare for second grade:
1. Review First Grade Skills
If you’re a new homeschooler or have been homeschooling for a while and are just getting ready to start second grade, reviewing the skills your child has learned in first grade is essential. This is because if she hasn’t mastered them yet, they’ll be harder to learn at this point. In addition, if your child has already mastered specific skills such as reading and math but not others like spelling or science, then it may be helpful for her to spend some time reviewing those areas too.
You can have your child review various first-grade topics in a game-based format that’s more fun for summertime on ABCya. It is free if you use ABCya on a desktop or web browser! Games are a little easier for kids to do during the summer, unlike review worksheets or flashcards.
2. Practice Writing
There are so many ways you can practice writing with your soon-to-be second grader over the summer. Handwriting is an important skill to master, after all.
- Write a story! Make up characters, draw pictures of them, and write about what happens to them.
- Write a journal entry. Write about something exciting that happened today or yesterday, or describe how your day is going so far. You could also write in this journal every night before bedtime!
- Write a letter to someone you know who lives far away (like an aunt), or even better yet—write one to someone who lives near where you used to live!
- Makeup lists of all kinds of things like food items at the grocery store; toys in your room; places around town that are fun for kids.
- Write poems! How many words can you think of that rhyme with “glue”? 5? 10? 15? 20…? It’s more complicated than it looks at first glance because most people don’t know what they’ll come up with until they start looking for them. But once you start thinking about making rhymes out loud (or even silently), it gets easier and easier every time.
- Write a song! Writing a song can be fun for kids who know how to play a musical instrument.
All of these are excellent ways to practice handwriting.
If you need some extra handwriting practice with manuscript letters, you can grab our free hamster handwriting printable, that has tracing practice for upper and lowercase letters. It also includes the numbers one through five.
If you want something a little more in-depth that covers tracing and writing letters and numbers then try out our travel sized handwriting curriculum book. This book features 70 pages of handwriting practice, and fun animals in unicorn pajamas to keep kids attention.
3. Write Stories to Prepare for Second Grade
Writing stories helps your child remember the first-grade sentence structure she learned. First-grade sentence structure consists of putting a capital letter at the beginning of a sentence and punctuation at the end. You can have your kids write a story about a topic of their choice, such as:
- Animals (or people) at the zoo
- Your family’s pets at home
- The animals that live in your neighborhood
You can also have them write about a character, such as:
- A favorite cartoon character.
- A famous person (alive or dead) who inspires them in some way
- An imaginary friend!
If you want to look into more work with your child’s favorite characters, you can check out our guide to the top five art projects to have your kids do with their favorite TV characters.
You can also get the 3 minute a day journal from amazon, to help your child improve their handwriting in just three minutes a day. It is great for jotting down stories, or even just notes about the day!
4. Prepare for the New Math
By now, you have probably already looked over your curriculum packages. If not, consider which curriculum you want to get for the year by reviewing the top five Christian curriculums on the market.
Now that you know what your child will be learning, it’s time to make sure she has a solid foundation in the basics. If your child was taught just addition and subtraction in first grade, now is the time to review these concepts before moving into next year’s curriculum. You can also practice counting and grouping; this will help her build a strong understanding of basic number operations so that she can quickly move on to multiplication, division, and problem-solving activities later in second grade.
Do you want some more practice tips? Prepare your child by reviewing basic math facts:
- counting numbers up to 200 (or however high they might have gone)
- writing numbers correctly
- reading numbers fluently backward and forward (this is an essential skill because it ensures that students understand how numbers work)
- using place value concepts
5. Read a Chapter Book to Build Stamina
Read a chapter book to build stamina. This is probably the most crucial part of preparing for second grade (or any grade), so take it seriously! If you want your child to be able to read longer books, then you need to start working on that now. Reading a chapter book will help them build up the stamina required for longer texts and help your kids get more comfortable reading more complex words and sentences.
If your first grader is not there yet, keep pushing the scope of her reading a little bit little.
A chapter book might seem like a tall order. Not every child is ready for it. I’m not saying that they should immediately read an entire novel by themselves just because they’re technically “ready” for second grade—but if they’ve already been reading some books on their own for a while, try something more challenging. If you are wondering what is considered a second-grade reading level, look at most of the Dr. Suess books. These are in a second through fourth grade AR Reading level. The AR program is not available to homeschoolers, but it is what public schools use to keep kids on track with their reading.
If you don’t want to visit a local library, you could grab something from Amazon with the Kindle Unlimited program. The Kindle Unlimited program is the best online library for homeschoolers!
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The key here is that this isn’t time wasted; it’s time well spent building up skills that will serve them well throughout the elementary school years!
Homeschoolers Can Prepare for Second Grade on Their Terms
As a homeschooling parent, you can choose what your child will learn. You can also decide how they will learn. You may want to take on the entire curriculum yourself or decide to teach specific subjects while you delegate other subjects to virtual teachers on Outschool.
As parents, you have the freedom of choosing when and where your child learns new concepts and ideas. And since it’s just the two of you in this classroom, there’s no pressure for your child to keep up with anyone else’s learning pace or schedule!
We’ve laid out a few ideas for you to consider when preparing your child for second grade. Remember, the most important thing is to keep it fun and engaging every step of the way!
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