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.)

yes yes yes! This sounds so bizarre to me that I can't even take it on faith, but the curriculum does say they add one extra place per year for several years. IIRC it went to fourth or fifth grade or something insane like that ( I think the highest mentioned was 10,000, which would be fifth grade, but maybe they got ambitious and made them learn two spots in one year). A couple of teachers have claimed this, too.

But, I just don't believe it. Once you understand the differences between 1,10, 100, then if you can't extrapolate to 1000 and into infinity then you don't really understand the difference between 10 and 100. They must not be teaching it well enough.

ETA: I checked up, and second grade goes to hundreds, third grade go all the way to 10,000, fourth to a million. BUT, the second grade standard says they need to be able to do ordinals up to 20, which clearly isn't some watershed the way adding single vs double digits is, so these standards are obviously formulated as the floor for kids who do not understand at all and need to rote memorise it all. And they could just not have the space to add in memorising that fifty-second equals number 52 in line instead of understanding the pattern.

This is accurate in my experience, although DD also began to accelerate in 2nd grade math, so we added in some other stuff. Definitely time, money, and regrouping with two-digit numbers in addition and subtraction. DD also did a lot of fact memorization in second. I actually thought 2nd was an important year, after a wasted year in 1st, but we also switched schools and curricula that year.

We didn't experience this thing with adding a place value every year. DD did place value up to the millions in second.

What also makes me think this is how much of the curriculum is measurement stuff -- time, money, temperature, weight, etc. Sure, this is important stuff to know in life, but it is in no way a building block of further math progress. They could just as easily pull it out as a separate subject, and let math go on its merry way. So stuffing all this into 2nd grade really does seem like a way to keep the math curriculum in a holding pattern until kids have matured a little.

What I remember from my own childhood is that they made it "harder" by giving bigger and bigger problems with endlessly dull computation, like "259,384 + 513,628." This is not conceptually any more difficult than simpler place-value and carrying problems, but it requires a heck of a lot more patience and attention and executive control. Hence, older kids are ready for it, younger kids aren't. QED.

I think the current pedagogical philosophy is that all that measuring makes math more concrete for everyone-- that it's developmentally important.

Some kids are ready for more abstract algorithms much earlier than others, of course.

I agree with using measurement problems as a tool for teaching arithmetic. I'm all in favor of making things concrete. That's different from taking time out of the curriculum to memorize combinations of coins, or the crazy imperial measurement system used in the U.S.

The measurement, and money is another way to make them practice addition and subtraction, make "math" relevant. It also makes math visual for those kids who don't really get the concepts easily. I see why it's part of the curriculum, and for the some kids pace this is useful. It's just really frustrating for the kids who just "get" it, who don't need this level of repetition. What drove me nuts was how much time was spend on "patterns" in K and 1st grade.

It's frustrating but many elementary teachers aren't very comfortable with math and just teach to the book not really understanding the concepts themselves. If their degree is in elementary education they might not have ever taken math higher than Algebra II.

What do you mean?

Joke.