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This SFUSD second-grade instructional guidance is organized into four sections: Culture of Learning, Academic Ownership, Essential Content, and Demonstration of Learning. We recommend you explore the four sections so you have a sense of what is available here and then focus on the Culture of Learning section for the start of the year. There you will find guidance on the development of 7 and 8-year-olds, setting up your classroom, building family partnerships, and launching the school year. For content-specific guidance go to Essential Content.
Our intention here is to provide an overview of second grade instruction and make the information easily accessible. This is not a scripted manual - second-grade instruction is more complex and nuanced than these pages alone can illustrate. Still, there is a lot of information here that we believe will be supportive. Please do not feel compelled to dive into this website all at once. Please use it as a resource throughout the year as needed. This guide is one piece of the puzzle; your partnerships with students, fellow teachers, coaches, families, administrators, sites, and departments are all essential to supporting you in creating a learning environment where every day we provide each and every student with the quality instruction and equitable support required to thrive.
In partnership,
The Instructional Guidance Team
Student-Centered Second Grade
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Each and every student comes to the classroom with a wealth of strengths and lived experiences along with specific developmental assets and needs. These constitute the root that instruction should be informed by and grow from. Honoring these roots, cultivate an environment where your students can tap into their joy for learning and nurture it with their classmates.
Support them to deeply engage in their learning by modeling, scaffolding, and providing ample opportunities to freely ask questions, openly explore and share their thinking, provide and use feedback, and ask for help when needed. Support each student to develop and demonstrate a sense of ownership for their own learning and that of their classmates - growing a sense of shared responsibility for academic and non-academic routines, procedures, and expectations throughout their second-grade experience.
Seven
After the outwardly expressive exuberance of six, sevens turn inward to consolidate the enormous cognitive and emotional growth they’ve just experienced. They become quieter and more sensitive, self-conscious, and self-absorbed as they figure out how to manage new feelings and cognitive structures. Seven is a year of moving forward cautiously, of craving security and structure while avoiding risk and uncertainty. This is a time when imagination and exploration meet with and find expression in order and precision.
Sevens are driven by curiosity and a strong internal desire to discover and invent. They’re intensely interested in how things work. Likewise, sevens appreciate the beauty and wonder of the world and love using hand lenses and the like to better discern the orderly arrangements of nature. This appreciation for order often extends to their own life - keeping their desks or table spots “just so.” Provide the predictability, security, structure, and time that sevens need to carefully and thoroughly engage their world.
Eight
Caution turns to confidence as sevens become eights. Eight-year-olds wake up in the morning with plans for adventure percolating before their feet hit the floor. Eight is inventive and creative, full of energy, curiosity, and imagination, always in a hurry to try the next thing - or to create the next thing themselves. With a friend, or better yet, a group of friends, eights roll along with plans for a parade or a play, thrilled with their truly wonderful ideas for “what” and blithely unconcerned with the “how.”
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This page was last updated on May 23, 2023