Look'n for opinions on 2nd grade hs curriculum for my son. He is a fast learner but does best w/illustrations

Question

A curriculum that has activities that supports what he is learning would be most ideal. Thanks so much!

Answer 1

For Math, Horizon's or Math U See.

Horizons has a readiness evaluation to help you see where to place him.

http://www.rainbowresource.com/product/H...

Math U See is available here:

http://www.mathusee.com/index.html

For reading, he would probably do well with any number of phonics curriculums.  A Beka has a really good one.  

http://www.abeka.com

So does Saxon.

http://www.pennywiselearning.com/Saxon-P...

Here is a free on-line one that is good, but you do have to put together some of your own resources:

http://www.letteroftheweek.com/index.htm...

For science and History, library books can be great.  If you want a Christian centered curriculum I can recommend several other things.

Answer 2

Reading stories and learning the phonics rules of vowel teams such as ea, ee, ow, aw, oo and the soft sound of g and c and the rules to know when the word has these sounds.  Help him understand the varied phonics rules for words will help him with his decoding.  Practice reading and rereading stories and listening to you read a story fluently to help him build his fluency skills.  Help him with test taking strategies for taking tests such as multiple choice questions and finding and removing the answers that he knows don't make sense.  Finding key words in the question (all, none).  Show him how to summarize and find the Main Idea in his reading to help him when taking tests.  All these activities can help him when he is in school.  Also, when doing math problems help him to take each piece and break it apart to solve the problem.  Teaching regrouping of double digit addition and subtraction problems will be addressed in 2nd grade so he could begin by learning place value (ones, tens, hundreds) showing him with base ten blocks or pictures if needed.