Second grade art, music, movement and life skills

Second grade is where cursive shows up in the Texas standards, earlier than most parents expect: the ELAR standards have second graders writing cursive letters, with third grade expecting legible cursive words and answers. PE moves from effort to form, and games start having rules a child follows without a referee. Money becomes counting collections of coins and bills and writing the amount properly. Cursive now has a room of its own here, built on the Palmer letterforms: the letters, then the joins, then whole words. It still wants paper next to it, and ten minutes a day beats an hour on Sunday.

• K
• 1st
• 2nd
• 3rd
• 4th
• 5th

What to aim for this year

By the end of second grade, a child working at grade level can usually do these.

• Makes a small test batch of something to sell, adds up what it cost to make, and sets a price above that cost
• Writes the cursive letters, which is what the Texas language arts standards put in this grade
• Counts a collection of coins and bills and writes the amount with a dollar sign and a decimal point
• Explains, in his own words, what a bank does with money someone deposits
• Runs, jumps and throws with recognizable form rather than raw effort
• Follows the rules of a simple game without an adult refereeing every play
• Hears a repeating rhythm pattern, identifies it, and writes it down
• Sings in a group and holds the melody instead of drifting to whoever is loudest
• Uses one medium on purpose, watercolor or oil pastel or collage, and can say why he picked it
• Describes what a painting shows, then separately describes how it was made
• Packs his own lunch and clears his own plate as a standing job rather than a request
• Sets up and cleans up his own art workspace without an adult resetting it
• Tells a flat shape from a solid form in artwork and names the pairs that match
• Describes the texture of a real object and makes a drawing that looks like it would feel that way
• Reads the staff well enough to say whether a written melody is going up or down
• Explains why teeth get holes and brushes twice a day for two minutes with fluoride toothpaste
• Explains that bones hold the body up and muscles pull on them to make it move

Teach it here

These rooms teach it on this site. No sign-up, nothing to buy, and they work with the internet switched off. Start here. Everything below is a fallback for when you want more than the app gives you.

• bricks — Six things to build with the bricks already in the house, read out one step at a time so a child who cannot read an instruction sheet can still follow one. Every build ends with a change-one-thing challenge: make it go further, hold more, reach out further before it tips.
• know — Health, safety and civics with no reading required: sleep, germs, teeth, crossing a road, calling for help, the fire rules, the five food groups, what is happening inside you, what a government is, the three branches, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, the national symbols, why we use money, and the globe. Flat Shapes, Solid Forms asks him to tell a shape from a form and match each pair: circle and ball, square and cube, triangle and cone.
• piano — A real keyboard with the room listening through the microphone: finding a note, matching one by ear, playing a pattern back, reading a note off the staff, and playing a whole song.
• cursive — Cursive from the Palmer letterforms: the letters, then sorting them by how they start (a swing up, an oval, or a hill), the baseline, midline and over-the-top joins, the tricky ones, spotting the letter whose slant does not match, the capitals, deciding before each capital whether the pen carries on or lifts, and finally whole words.
• money — Counting coins and bills, which is the second grade money standard almost exactly
• clock — Telling time to five minutes, the other half of second grade practical math
• art — Composition and drawing practice
• music — Beat, pitch and simple rhythm reading
• patterns — Pattern recognition, which is what reading a rhythm actually is
• copycat — Echo-back sequences, useful as ear training warm-up
• mixing — Color mixing with intent, not just discovery
• listen — Sound discrimination for instrument identification
• tracing — Letter formation, still useful while cursive is being introduced on paper
• wallet — Counting a pile of bills and coins and writing the amount with a dollar sign and a decimal point, telling producers from consumers, and adding up what a simple thing cost to make.
• staff — Read the Music: hear a repeating rhythm and pick its notation, then write one down from ta, ti-ti, rest and ta-a tiles, and read a written melody to say whether it goes up, down or stays the same.

What a week looks like

1. Monday: ten minutes of cursive on paper, then one Carnegie Hall Link Up activity
2. Tuesday: one PBS LearningMedia art or music clip, then make something in that medium
3. Wednesday: one CFPB money activity, then count a real jar of coins and bills
4. Thursday: outside, a real game with real rules, plus a GoNoodle reset between seated subjects
5. Friday: print a National Gallery painting, describe what it shows, then describe how it was made

If you want more, free

A fallback, not the plan. Every one of these costs nothing, and the license tag says what you may actually DO with it, which is a different question from whether it is free to read.

• National Gallery of Art open access images Free Public domain

  More than 60,000 high-resolution images of public domain works, downloadable straight from the object page. American and European painting is especially deep here.

  License: Open access images are released under CC0: free for any use, commercial or not, with no permission needed. Works still under copyright are excluded from the set. The credit line is appreciated but not required.

• Carnegie Hall Link Up for Families Free Free to use

  Carnegie Hall's Link Up program adapted for families at home: an interactive map of the orchestra, sing-along and play-along videos with interactive sheet music, and a write-your-own-song activity. Built for grades 3 to 5 and usable a year early with a parent alongside.

  License: Free to use on their site. Copyrighted by Carnegie Hall.

• CFPB youth financial education activities Free Free to use

  Short, interdisciplinary money activities searchable by grade band, plus the Money as You Grow reading guides that pair a picture book with questions to ask while you read it.

  License: Published by a federal agency and free to download and print. Federal works are generally free of copyright. The site carries no explicit reuse grant, so read the agency's own terms before republishing anything.

• PBS LearningMedia Free See terms

  Free clips and activities from public television, with a decent amount of art and music. Search by grade and subject rather than browsing, or you will lose twenty minutes. The national address routes you to your local station's portal, which in this part of Texas is Houston Public Media.

  License: Free for education with a free account. Rights vary item by item and many clips stay copyrighted by their producers, so check the terms on the individual resource before using anything outside your own home.

• GoNoodle Free See terms

  Three to five minute movement videos. At this age they work best as a reset between two seated subjects rather than as the PE block itself.

  License: Free for families, with no account required on the mobile and TV apps. Copyrighted. The paid product, SuperNoodle, is licensed to schools rather than families.

And the paid programs, honestly

Nothing here is required. These are the programs families most often ask about, with the real drawback of each one named rather than skipped.

• Hoffman Academy Premium Paid Reported figures vary by plan and year, roughly $20 to $25 a month or about $150 to $240 a year. Verify current pricing on the site.

  Good at: The free video lessons are a genuine multi-year piano course, so the paid tier only adds printable music, games, exercises and practice tracking. A company that leaves the actual teaching free is unusual and deserves the credit.

  Drawback: You need a keyboard with at least 61 keys, ideally weighted, and someone has to sit beside a seven-year-old for practice or nothing happens. The premium tier is optional, so do not buy it until the free lessons have stuck for a month.

  Suits: A family with a keyboard already in the house and no piano teacher nearby.

• A cursive workbook (Handwriting Without Tears, Zaner-Bloser, or similar) Paid Single-level workbooks commonly $13 to $30. Verify current pricing.

  Good at: Cheap, one page a day, and it gives cursive a fixed slot instead of a good intention. Texas puts cursive letters in second grade and legible cursive words and answers in third, so it is on the list whether you buy a book or not.

  Drawback: Workbook drilling does not transfer on its own. A child can finish a whole cursive book and still print everything else, unless you then require real writing in cursive. Check the current Texas ELAR standards for your grade rather than trusting a publisher's alignment claim.

  Suits: Any Texas second grader, since this is the year the standards start it.

• ARTistic Pursuits Paid The K-3 books list around $57 and are frequently discounted by homeschool retailers. Supply bundles cost extra. Not explicitly religious in its art instruction, though it is sold mainly through Christian homeschool retailers. Verify current pricing.

  Good at: Book-based, no screen, 36 lessons a book at about one a week. It teaches the elements of art, composition, media technique and art history, then has the child apply the concept to a subject from his own environment rather than copying an adult's finished picture. One book covers a wide age band, so it stretches across siblings.

  Drawback: Dry on the page. The parent has to read it, gather supplies and run the lesson, and a child who expects a video will resist it. Supply requirements vary by edition and supply-inclusive bundles cost considerably more than the book.

  Suits: A screen-limited house where the parent is willing to prepare and teach.

• Martial arts or gymnastics Paid Commonly $80 to $150 a month locally, plus testing fees. Rates vary sharply by gym; verify with the specific one.

  Good at: Balance, body awareness and coordination in a structured setting, plus practice taking correction from an adult who is not a parent. Both build the trunk strength that shows up later as handwriting stamina.

  Drawback: Monthly fees that creep, testing and uniform fees on top, and typically 45 minutes twice a week. Belt progression can quietly become the point instead of the movement.

  Suits: A child who needs structure and correction more than he needs a team.

• A used sewing kit, a hand drill and real tools Paid $30 to $60 gets a usable starter set of needles, hoops, a small hand drill and sandpaper.

  Good at: Not a curriculum, and better than one. Real hand tools at seven build grip strength, patience and the ability to finish a physical object. A threaded needle and a square of burlap teaches more fine-motor control than a worksheet does.

  Drawback: Supervision required, and cheap tools frustrate a child badly enough to end the interest. Buy fewer and better. There is also no lesson plan, so you have to invent the projects yourself.

  Suits: A child who wants to make real things and is bored by paper.

Prices are approximate and change often. Check with the publisher before you buy. We describe and link to these programs; none of their material is hosted here.

The rest of second grade