Most students enter second grade able to read and write. To what extent they are able to perform these skills and to what degree of difficulty is what differentiates these students from one another and ultimately dictates the forms of instruction employed by the teacher.

The reading goal for each second grader is to become familiar with the text structures for both non-fiction and fiction text, read a variety of genres, and to employ strategies to help them comprehend and read with fluency increasingly difficult levels of text. Students at the primary grade level need to build a solid foundation in order to read for learning at higher grade levels.

The writing goal for each second grader is to become familiar with writing conventions and to utilize these writing conventions independently when constructing a variety of prose.

In math, the goal is for each student to become mentally agile when performing number computations. Second graders will learn how to count back change, a skill in which many cashiers are lacking. Strong mathematical agility provides a foundation on which students build the skills to perform more and more complicated mathematical problems.

I begin the position of 2nd Grade Teacher in January 2012. The teacher who I am replacing has taken many of the materials which she used to supplement those provided by the school district. The classroom currently lacks a library of books for students to choose when working independently. Any available math manipulatives need to be checked out and shared between teachers, which limits their independent use by students to reinforce new and old concepts, and the writing center is barren. Basic items like sentence strips and lined chart paper need to be purchased. Copy paper is a commodity.