Second

Curriculum

In Second Grade, we spend our year building up from our foundation of computer skills! At the beginning of the year, we start with going over the physical hardware of the computer, and talk about the different software we interact with at school and home. 

Once students are comfortable in the computer lab and are able to identify the difference between hardware and software, we jump right into online skills! Students in Second Grade log in using Clever badges, which are small QR codes. The first set of skills we review in Second Grade are mouse skills. Since Second Graders are coming in with two years of mouse skills, we jump right into games that focus on two main mouse skills; point & click, and drag & drop. I will be including links to various games used to support these skills at the bottom of this page! 

After students have mastered working with the computer mouse, we move into keyboarding.  Second Grade students spend about 8-10 minutes at the beginning of every class typing. The platform 2nd grade uses is called Typing.com, and its the perfect entry-level keyboarding platform. Students learn about the importance of proper posture and finger placement, and are encouraged to try their best to use those skills while typing. 

While students are reviewing these computer skills, they are also learning about ways to stay safe on the internet and the importance of being a good Digital Citizen! We spend October and November going over these topics, and use a variety of stories, videos, and discussions to help students understand the importance of these topics. 

These skills bring us to the month of December, which is where a shift in curriculum occurs! In December each year, techies worldwide celebrate something called "The Hour of Code," which is a campaign organized by Code.org to inspire students to learn more about coding. Believe it or not, our Second Grade students spend the month learning to code basic computer programs! Teaching them these basic programming skills is an important prerequisite for our January curriculum, which is all about programming robots! Students will be working with age appropriate robots, and will be collaborating with one another to program their robot through an obstacle course in the classroom! 

After our unit on robots, we spend February, March and April working with different websites to help build students' numeracy and literacy skills. These websites are also helping students continue to build their mouse and keyboarding skills as well! 

We end our year with an intro to research and word processing (Google Docs and Slides) to help prepare them for the 3rd grade curriculum. This unit help to pull everything we've worked on over the course of the year together. 

Online Resources