This homeschool year, my youngest began second grade. It’s hard for me to believe that after all these years, I’m done with rainbow counting bears and letters of the alphabet. I’m savoring every moment of these younger years with him; they are some of my favorite in the homeschooling journey. These are the years of enthusiastic wonder, and lots of energy! I love his boyishness and his sense of humor, and how these characteristics play a part in all of his learning.
He has his own set of struggles, working through some mild dyslexia and dysgraphia. And with a family full of ADHD, it’s hard to tell right now how much is second-grade boyishness and how much is his own potential ADHD presenting. He’s my clown and a regular performer, and often after our once a week class at a local charter school, I was informed of his frequent interruptions. When I questioned him about one of those incidents, he answered so matter of factly: “It was interesting and I had lots of questions!” I have no doubt he did, too.
So here’s what it looks like to homeschool a second-grader like mine and the homeschool curriculum favorites that worked well for us this year.
Homeschool Curriculum for Second Grade
Homeschool Math for Second Grade
Because of his personality and learning style, I’ve found it best to teach him math by concept and pull from a variety of resources. We ended up mixing CTCmath with Math Mammoth and a few RightStart manipulatives. (All of which I already had because of my older kids.) For a while, I needed him to be more independent, so he worked through several units of CTCmath and did very well with most topics. When he struggled with a particular topic, we took a break and used Math Mammoth and Reflex math for a while. Occasionally, I’d bring in base ten cards or the abacus or some other manipulative from our RightStart math kit to teach a lesson. All in all, we kept math to about 30 minutes a day, 15 minutes on new concepts and 15 minutes reviewing facts with Reflex Math games.
Homeschool Phonics and Spelling for Second Grade
While I read several reviews saying that Nessy is just not enough as a full curriculum for a child with dyslexia, this was not my experience at all. I first began using Nessy as a supplement alongside some Logic of English resources, but my son did much better with Nessy. The humorous videos teaching the various phonics sounds really helped him to remember his rules the way nothing else had. The online games did an excellent job reinforcing the lessons, and the optional printables with every lesson gave us more than enough practice. Over the last couple of years, I have been very impressed with Nessy. I did sit alongside him as he went through the lessons online and taught him when I saw that he was having trouble, reminding him of a rule or helping him sound something out. But all in all, this has been an excellent program that I’ve highly recommended to others.
Nessy does not have a reading component. We’ve added that on our own, but I’ve found that he is much more interested in reading when we read the books he enjoys rather than a leveled reader from any program. So, we’ve read a variety of books, some of them his choice and some of them from the reading list in our Tapestry of Grace curriculum.
Right now, we are reading the Winnie-the-Pooh stories together, taking turns with each paragraph or each choosing a character as we read. It’s been precious, such a fun way to practice reading as we giggle through these stories together and provide our own imitations of the beloved characters. Another favorite of his is the Mercy Watson series. He’s read these books to our library’s therapy dogs or over Facetime to family and friends. In this way, he’s enjoying the point of reading and not just struggling through a program.
Last but not least, Handwriting Without Tears has worked wonders for us. He loves the program and has made some pretty remarkable progress as we’ve slowly made our way through the program.
Homeschool History for Second Grade
One of my favorite things about our Tapestry of Grace curriculum is that the whole family has the opportunity to learn together. So as my older children read about Mahatma Gandhi, my youngest learns about India and reads cultural stories. While my older children learn details about the struggle of the civil rights movement, my youngest reads about the bravery of the “Little Rock Nine” and Martin Luther King Jr. And when we cover the Vietnam War with my middle schoolers, my youngest studies the geography and culture of Vietnam and reads a touching story (The Lotus Seed) about an immigrant family’s memories of their home country.
Then, as we complete a unit together, we wrap it up with a celebration, where each child brings an element of their learning to the party, presenting speeches or displaying dioramas. My second grader loves having a part to play in the decorating, planning, and presenting.
Whole family learning is the best. It is such an integral part of how we learn, that we just can’t fathom doing it any other way.
In addition to Tapestry of Grace, I also added a few Master Books geography resources, the Children’s Atlas of God’s World and Passport to the World. These beautiful books wonderfully enriched our culture and geography studies, and I’m looking forward to continuing to use them next year as well.
Homeschool Science for Second Grade
Science is one of those subjects that, when I look at my budget and have to decide on curriculum or experiment kits, the kits win out every time. This year’s topics were astronomy, geology, and weather. We spent about 10-12 weeks on each topic, and I spent the bulk of our science budget on kits. I did purchase a sticker factbook for astronomy, and then checked out a lot of books from the library. We read through the books, memorized some terms, and then we played.
My son used his astronomy knowledge to imagine his own planet and the creatures that would survive on his planet, constructing his own planet out of paper-mache. Then, we erupted volcanoes, created gas lakes, cracked geodes, made mineral crystals, and studied different types of rocks. We finished the year with a multi-week weather journal, using real weather instruments to record and forecast weather. Each day, he checked and recorded the temperature, the wind direction, the barometric pressure, and the rainfall.
It’s been such a fun year, in spite of all the cultural upheavals and shutdowns. This year more than ever, we’ve been so thankful for homeschooling. I’m thrilled to see how much progress he’s made, and so is he!
I have SO loved looking through your blog. I stumbled upon the “lots and lots of resources” post and have loved hearing from someone further down the road. We are super fresh with this whole dyslexia, dysgraphia, and adhd diagnosis with our 9 year old. I am also wondering about our 7 year old son and whether a diagnosis for him is coming down the pipeline. We are working through Diane Craft’s dysgraphia program now with both boys and I’m wanting a plan forward with our 7 year old. Nessy has a deal now and I”m a bit confused. We will continue doing an All About Reading lesson with our 7 year old. Do you think it would be helpful to add on nessy to All about reading? I don’t want to confuse him but also feel like extra practice would be helpful. I would not be able to sit with him while he did it…would he be able to do it independently?
Also, when you refer to working through the handwriting without tears program…does that mean you just do the workbook for the school year or is there more to it? We have not used HWT. If my 9 and 7 year old have not done their workbooks, would you start them at the beginning? Or choose grade level workbooks? Thanks for listening. No worries if you don’t know. It was just like finding a breath of fresh air to read about your journey and that maybe we aren’t totally alone here. I appreciate your thoughtfulness in your homeschool and desire to keep your relationship strong with your kiddos.
we recently also bought dyslexia games to work into our days. so who knows how all this will melt together.
Julie, great to meet you! It sounds like you’ve got a fantastic plan in place. Nessy is often used as a supplement, for extra practice and to provide an independent activity when you need your child to work alone. You are already using a solid program. Nessy would not be necessary; but if you need him to work independently every now and then or if you feel he could use a little extra practice and exposure, than Nessy is a great option. The only reason I supervised my son while he used Nessy was because I was using it as my primary curriculum, and he had progressed all the way to Island 10, which gets pretty advanced (sometimes he needed words/sounds repeated or coaching through his rules).
For HWT, I used both the workbooks and the app (Wet-Dry-Try). The app was very helpful and really helped us turn a corner with handwriting. He still comes back to it every now and then when he forgets how to write a letter. My son is also left-handed, which is another reason why this curriculum, I think, was very helpful for him. I plan on continuing with it next year as well. Thanks for visiting my blog! And if you have any more questions feel free to comment or email me.
One more question…what kind of involvement did you have when your daughter did dyslexia games? Just let them do it and move on? Or point out things?
Great question! I looked over an exercise after they finished, found a couple of things to praise, and then coached them where to look to find the error. The point of the exercises is to teach them to see small details, so I found coaching them where to look to find the missing details much more effective than actually correcting the page. Depending on their level of ability, I might only have them do one puzzle on a page, or complete half the page. For the Word Hunts, I either let them take several days to complete it or only required a certain number of entries.