Science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education piques students' innate curiosity and opens their eyes to hundreds of career possibilities. This column presents ideas and techniques to enhance your science teaching. This month's issue shares information about a STEM enrichment project for second graders that incorporates nutrition and…

This article describes how second-grade students' literacy learning was enhanced as they used their developing knowledge of nonfiction in an integrated English language arts/science unit toward the creation of multimodal nonfiction science books. After explaining the Common Core State Standards that guided the unit, the author outlines the…

Community workers and community services are a typical part of the second grade curriculum in many American schools. However, the content provided in textbooks often lacks depth and the personal connection that students need to make their learning meaningful. How many times have seven year olds already learned about fire fighters and mail…

Describes a long-term science study project on natural disasters and phenomena in a second-grade classroom in which students had the major responsibility to plan, choose, inquire, and problem solve as they chose topics, browsed and read, planned and made murals, wrote and drew in their journals, and designed dramas which mixed story and…

The Super3 research process equips students with their own set of handy tools so that they can take the most ordinary facts and transform them into amazing research projects. The second grade students have created Native American homes by applying the Super3 process and its tools such as graphic organizers, trash and treasure note taking, and the…

Students focus on people who make a difference. The unit features men and women whose achievements have had a direct or indirect influence in the students' lives. These individuals include heroes from long ago and the recent past along with people who are currently active in the local community. The unit is crafted around biographies. It aims to…

Finds that a strategy-instruction approach helped second-grade students to find needed information in the nonfiction texts they read and eliminate the copying of text. Discusses how students learned to search for information, take notes, organize notes, and use those notes to compose a report in their own words. (SR)

This action research project was conducted in a 2nd-grade classroom in the Midwest to determine the effects of technology on responses to texts. Six texts, representing a variety of rending levels, were selected for the children to read. Children in the control group read and did research from printed texts, and children in the treatment group…

This instructional unit was built upon the idea that most of the children from a second and a sixth grade classroom already had some knowledge about the social history of their community in Loveland, Colorado. The teachers implementing the unit helped these students make connections between the past and present and thereby develop an understanding…

The goal of this lesson plan is for second-grade students to understand the steps in how food is made and delivered to the grocery store. Students create a play where each person plays a part in the production and distribution of food. The lesson suggests that the class perform the play on parents' night. It provides five activities for students…