Second grade writing, grammar and spelling

Second grade is where Texas parts company with most of the country. The Texas standard says a second grader develops handwriting by accurately forming all cursive letters using appropriate strokes when connecting letters. Common Core does not ask for cursive at any grade. So a Texas family carries cursive on top of everything else this year, while printing has to stay legible for real work. Spelling moves to long vowels, r-controlled vowels, and common prefixes and suffixes. Writing moves from a sentence to a paragraph that stays on one topic.

• 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.

• Develops handwriting by accurately forming all cursive letters, using appropriate strokes when connecting letters. This is the Texas grade 2 standard, quoted. Common Core has no cursive requirement at all.
• Keeps printing legible and correctly spaced while cursive is being learned, because most of his real work still gets printed.
• Edits for complete sentences with subject and verb agreeing.
• Capitalizes proper nouns, months, days of the week, and the greeting of a letter.
• Uses apostrophes in contractions and in singular possessives.
• Uses commas in a series and in dates.
• Spells words with long-vowel patterns, r-controlled vowels, common prefixes and suffixes, and irregular high-frequency words.
• Uses past, present and future verbs correctly, including some irregular past forms.
• Writes a paragraph of several sentences that all stay on one topic, plus a short informational piece and a letter.
• Plans before writing, with a list or a drawing, rather than starting cold.
• Names the five steps of the writing process and knows which one he is in.
• Drafts by getting the ideas down without stopping to fix every word.
• Tells revising apart from editing, and does the revising first.
• Supports an opinion with reasons joined by linking words such as because, and, and also.
• Writes a narrative that tells what happened and how it felt, not only what happened.
• Organizes facts by putting the ones that belong together into the same group.
• Forms and uses common irregular plural nouns
• Uses adverbs that tell how, when or where the action happened
• Spells plurals of words ending in y, changing the y to ies after a consonant
• Knows an apostrophe marks a contraction or a possessive and never marks a plural
• Spells words with the vowel teams ai, ay, ee and oa
• Names the handwriting model being learned and explains why cursive was built for speed. Texas begins cursive instruction in grade 2.
• Sorts the lowercase cursive letters into the three families that share a starting stroke.
• Writes cursive with the forearm gliding on the desk instead of with the fingers alone, which is the movement the Palmer model is built on.
• Forms the cursive lowercase letters that begin with an upstroke from the baseline, and explains why they start below the letter.
• Forms the cursive lowercase letters that begin with a downcurve — a, c, d, g, o and q — by reusing the print stroke already learned.

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.

• piece — A whole short piece of his own: put three things in the order they happened, give a real reason for what you think, say something true about a topic, pick the opening that makes somebody read on, write three sentences in a box, and tell revising apart from editing. It reads his piece back to him afterwards.
• sentence — Everything a child writes, built by tapping tiles rather than typing: spell a word from its letters, build a heard sentence from word tiles, choose the mark that ends it, join two halves with the word that makes sense, pick the sentence that covers a whole paragraph, put the paragraph back in order, and find the one thing that is wrong.
• write — Letter formation as a stroke with a starting point and a direction, not as a shape to copy. Capitals and small letters with numbered dots, then which of the three lines each letter touches, then the print families (c a d g o q, l i t j, v w x y z k) from memory with the start and the direction checked, his own first name with no model, digits, and finally any letter on a blank line.
• 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.
• stories — Syllable-chunked read-alongs, which line up with the syllable work second-grade spelling depends on.
• typing — Keyboarding. Not a substitute for the handwriting standard, but useful once printing is legible.
• endings — Plurals and past tenses of words ending in y (babies, cried) beside the ones that keep their y (boys, played, crying), with both endings on the tray so the tray never gives the rule away.
• grammar — Irregular past verbs at the right time (went, not goed; slept, not sleeped), and the adverbs that tell how, when or where, tapped inside the sentence.
• marks — Capitals and punctuation put in by hand: he taps the gap where each space, period, comma, apostrophe or quotation mark goes, and taps the words that need capitals. Seventeen steps from spaces between words in kindergarten to capitals for names, days and months, apostrophes, commas in lists, dates and addresses, a letter's greeting and closing, dialogue, compound and complex sentences, commas around extra information in fifth grade, and a comma that changes what a sentence means ("Let's eat, Grandma!").
• notes — Sorting facts into the groups they belong to, putting the five writing steps (plan, draft, revise, edit, publish) in order, and naming which step a writer is in from what he is doing.

What a week looks like

1. Five days, ten minutes of cursive. Letter groups first, joins second, whole words only after the joins are clean.
2. Four days, a short dictation passage. Read it twice, then he writes it, then he checks it against the original himself.
3. Two days, one paragraph of his own on one topic, planned with a three-item list before a word gets written.
4. One day, reread last week's paragraph and fix two things. Two, not everything.

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.

• The Good and the Beautiful, Language Arts Level 2 Free Openly licensed

  Free full-year PDF, course book plus Reading Boosters. Grammar terms, punctuation and short writing assignments are woven through the lessons rather than taught as a separate subject.

  License: Free to download and fully copyrighted, not openly licensed. Personal use with your own children only.

• Core Knowledge Language Arts (CKLA), Grade 2 Free Creative Commons Not confirmed

  Free grade 2 units with spelling and encoding work, sentence and paragraph writing, and content-rich read-alouds that give a second grader something worth writing about.

  License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike, 3.0 Unported on the documents I checked. Adapt and share with credit, no commercial use, and ShareAlike carries forward.

• The Palmer Method of Business Writing (A. N. Palmer) Free Public domain

  The original cursive manual, free in full text on Project Gutenberg. You are mining it for letterforms, joins and drill ideas, not handing the book to a seven-year-old. Print the letter models onto lined paper and you have a free cursive program. Verified: Gutenberg ebook 66476, Palmer, with copyright dates running 1901 through 1915.

  License: Public domain in the United States, stated on the Gutenberg record. Copy, print, adapt and republish freely.

• The Ayres spelling list (Leonard P. Ayres, 1915) Free Public domain

  A Measuring Scale for Ability in Spelling. The thousand commonest written English words, sorted by difficulty into columns lettered A through Z. Still a sound backbone for placement, review, and building your own word lists. Several paid programs are built on top of it. The Internet Archive scan runs 71 pages.

  License: Public domain in the United States. The 1915 scan is free to copy and adapt.

• Easy Peasy All-in-One Homeschool, Language Arts 2 Free Public domain Not confirmed

  A free, complete, day-by-day online course covering reading, spelling, grammar and writing. Assignments are short and the child works from the screen, which helps a parent juggling several kids.

  License: Check the license. It is free to use on the site and appears to be ordinary copyright rather than open licensing, but I could not read the current terms directly, and the course links out to third-party and public domain material whose licenses vary item by item. Read the terms yourself before reusing anything.

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.

• All About Spelling Level 2 Paid About $65 to $70 for the level. Level 1 is $64.95 and Level 4 is $69.95 at the publisher, so the middle levels sit in that band. Tiles and review box are one-time purchases already made in Level 1.

  Good at: By Level 2 the rules start doing real work, and the built-in cumulative review means words learned in September are still there in April. The child can tell you why a word is spelled the way it is.

  Drawback: Parent-intensive every day, and slow if you are running two or more students. Nothing about it is independent work.

  Suits: Continuing a program you already started, which is the main reason to buy Level 2 at all.

• Handwriting Without Tears, Cursive Kickoff (Learning Without Tears) Paid Roughly $13 to $18 for the student workbook. Approximate.

  Good at: This is the publisher's second grade cursive book, which lines up with the Texas timeline exactly. It reviews print letters in developmental order first, then moves into lowercase cursive, so the transition is gradual. Short lessons keep frustration down during the hardest change in handwriting.

  Drawback: Its cursive letterforms are simplified and do not match the traditional models on most wall charts and free worksheets, so mixing sources causes confusion. The teacher's guide is again where the method lives. If you would rather finish printing first, Printing Power is the same publisher's grade 2 print book and Cursive Handwriting is their grade 3 cursive book.

  Suits: A Texas second grader who has to start cursive this year and is not thrilled about it.

• Writing With Ease, Complete Level 2, Revised Edition (Well-Trained Mind Press) Paid Roughly $35 to $50 for the all-in-one revised book, with consumable student pages sold separately around $20. Original and revised editions are not compatible with each other.

  Good at: Dictation lengths grow on a deliberate schedule, so the ability to hold a sentence in his head grows with them. Low prep, four short days a week, passages printed in the book. The revised Level 2, like Level 1, is a single volume with the instruction and the student pages together.

  Drawback: The core four days still avoid original composition, which is a design choice and a real mismatch for parents who want stories now. Literature-heavy and light on expository work. The revised edition's optional fifth day is the only creative writing in it.

  Suits: A parent who wants the writing lesson written for them.

• Spelling You See, Level C or D Paid Around $65 to $75 for a complete set including the instructor's handbook, based on Level B's verified price of about $65 at the publisher. Student workbooks alone run about $50. Check the specific level before ordering.

  Good at: No weekly test, so no weekly dread. The daily passage copywork covers handwriting at the same time, which is efficient in a year already carrying cursive.

  Drawback: Rules are never stated, only encountered. A child who thinks in rules will find it maddening, and a parent who wants measurable mastery will find the feedback vague. It also costs more than the marketing suggests.

  Suits: A child who is fine at reading and panics at spelling tests.

• Rod & Staff English 2, Preparing to Build Paid About $18 for the pupil textbook and about $21 for the teacher's manual at Milestone Books, so roughly $40 for the pair. Worksheets and tests are extra. Checked August 2026.

  Good at: Thorough, orderly, and inexpensive. It genuinely teaches the conventions rather than assuming the child will absorb them, and the publisher keeps prices close to cost.

  Drawback: Explicitly Mennonite content throughout, which is a hard stop for many families. The drill load is heavy for a seven-year-old and the lessons assume a classroom pace.

  Suits: A family that wants old-fashioned grammar instruction and is comfortable with the publisher's religious content.

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.

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