Literacy Skills by Grade: Second Grade

So, what should your second grader know in terms of their literacy skills? Do you want to know whether or not your children successfully learned the material they were taught? One area of academic achievement that you can gauge, perhaps the most important one, is literacy.

Regarding reading, according to the American Speech Hearing Association*, second grade children should know all the letters and their sounds. They should be able to find and use spelling patterns in words, such as the /an/ sound in "can" and "pan." Second grade is when the child should be able to identify characters, the main idea, and the plot of a story. When reading a story, they should be able to predict what happens next and retell the story in the correct order. Also, their reading should be smooth with few occurrences of sounding out words.

From a writing perspective, they should be using many different types of sentences in their poetry, short stories, and class journals. They should be correctly using capitalization and basic punctuation marks, and successfully spelling common words. When writing stories, there should be a defined beginning, middle and end.

See if your second grader is meeting these literacy progression milestones. With summer break here, you can use the time to enhance their literacy skills and prepare them for the third grade.

* "Watch My Literacy Skills Grow: Second Grade.", American Speech Hearing Association. 25 May 2018. https://www.asha.org/uploadedImages/Literacy-Skills-Second-Grade.jpg