Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Age or Ability Specific Forums Elementary School What is 2nd grade math, anyway?

DD6.0 is finishing 1st grade math, and dabbling in 3rd and 4th grade math. In thinking about what to work on over the summer, I'm puzzled -- where's the 2nd grade math? It seems like a dead zone. Okay, borrowing and carrying, she needs work on that. And decimals, haven't done that. But does she really need to practice calculating how many ounces in a hectare or whatever?

Maybe the 2nd grade curriculum is just marking time until kids are developmentally ready for multiplication? It just seems to have less conceptual content than what comes before or after it. Or do they really need a whole year of this?

I remember wondering the same! I think the big thing is place value. Some kids just get it, fully, very young, and with them it's hard to see as an issue at all. But for others, this is really tricky and needs lots of reinforcement in each slightly different context.

Mathematics at least in the U.S. is what they call "Spiral" in nature. Many years like 1st/2nd it is mostly the same topics, but each year just a bit more "difficult" ie.. adding number up to 100 and then the next year to 1000. I think this may work for many kids to get mastery in the long run, go back review what you learned last year and take it a bit further. But for kids who are gifted in math this is simply frustrating, repetitive and unnecessary.

I remember my own frustration with elementary school math, echoed in the standards I read for DD a few years ago. They spent a full month every year on place value - increasing it one place per year: ones and tens in K, to 100 in 1st, hundreds in 2nd, thousands in 3rd... At a school math night I tried to express to a teacher that this was the SAME PROBLEM. It is not harder to add 10,000 + 30,000 than to add 1 + 3, once you understand place value; and if you don't get place value, then 100 + 300 is already too hard. The math teacher looked entirely baffled. I take from this that for many kids, I'm wrong and they actually do need to spend time learning that each new place also works on a tens system.

2nd grade math seems to be the prealgebra of basic numeracy: making sure all the holes are filled so that once math facts are learned, kids will be able to put them to use. There is not a lot of new content, but a lot of review and closer-to-mastery expectations.

I'm not in the US but it seems to me the first term was statistical data collection and display plus really basic maths facts. I am starting to get the impression that we have to teach them multiplication tables at home. It seems to be forbidden to teach any algorithms so they are also learning multiple ways to solve everything. The odd thing is I was taught almost entirely by algorithm and I still somehow squires the short cuts. It does seem odd that all maths apparently must be done mentally (I could be wrong about this though).

Second grade math includes solid understanding of place values, addition and subtraction with regrouping, basic multiplication and division such as 7 times 3 or 36 divided by 12 ( using addition and subtraction as basis, not memorized timetables), knows how to read time and count money, has a good concept of various types of measurements (distance, weight, area, etc), good understanding of fractions, can read and create basic bar graphs, and can solve real life problems using all the stuff learned. Like others have mentioned, most kids here might chew through this in a month. But for an average second grader, this is a lot to cover in 9 months. Dd surprised my sister by doing 300 plus 300 plus 300 in her head when she was 3. When I said what's the big deal she knows 3+3+3, my sister who is a teacher told me how much older kids have a problem undertanding this concept. Dd understood most of this stuff conceptually before she turned 4. However, she needed to be taught the mechanics to solve problems consistently. For example, earlier this year, she was trying to add big numbers in her head and getting frustrated if she got wrong answers. I showed her once how to write down the numbers and add using regrouping. She immediately got it and solved about 20 problems in her workbook while I was making tea.

I don't remember DD learning even all of the things that were mentioned (although it was a year ago now). Addition and subtraction ad nauseum as well as geometric shapes (like identify a quadrilateral). Multiplication at the end of the year like "What are two fives." (complete with pictures to illustrate that). Time (but I don't think to the minute) and counting money. Place value to maybe the 100s or 1000s place. I don't think they did anything with decimals except to how they relate to money. Like $1.25 is 1 dollar 25 cents. Very basic fractions like 3/4 means you have 3 pieces out of 4 total pieces but really nothing beyond that. They are just getting into equivalent fractions now and improper fractions at the end of third grade.

This is going to be truly painful for DS if he is forced to sit through it next year in second grade. Right now his first grade teacher is giving him problems like -16 - (-22)= ? No idea what grade level that is supposed to be but he has no problem understanding.

FWIW, I didn't even bother looking at what was being taught at school after I saw how farcical the K Maths was. After that I started talking through things with my DD and once I saw how quickly she got things I used the Singapore Maths books until the end their 5th grade offerings then did Lure of the Labyrinth and lately AoPS pre-Algebra.

Our second grade math curriculum is actually meaningful because the kids are graduating from Montessori math into Singapore math.

For a challenge, I recommend getting the Singapore word problem books (Amazon). There are some tricky problems, even in the lower grades. My DS is no slouch and he is finding quite a few of the 3rd grade Singapore word problems to be difficult.

I get your point- I think at least a few first graders are ready to go straight into multiplication, and wonder if much of the year is waiting for most/all the rest to catch up.

The main focus of second grade math is generally adding and subtracting two (and possibly three) digit numbers with regrouping. There is also some multiplication--generally up to the fives, some work with simple fractions, money calculations, and calculations with other units (inches to feet, for example). I would not say it's just marking time. I felt that second grade was where things finally picked up for a bit.

(I'm basing this on experience as a homeschooler with both the Saxon and Singapore math programs. I know that reform math programs in schools--like Investigations and Everyday Math--are different.)