Alongside the practice of decimal place value, cursive writing, and drawing without contour lines, the central topic of this year is the human gift of distinguishing between what is right and what is wrong.
The Second Year – Setting the Moral Compass
What is good, what is bad, and why?
These are profound questions, and the children long for answers.
Avoiding intellectual discussion, morality is approached in a pictorial way through the accessible messages of Aesop’s Fables.
These short, often humorous and always meaningful stories appeal to children.
And the fable-way of showing the results of good, questionable and bad behaviour makes a deep and lasting impression.
Class 2 Literacy
Fable stories, being short, provide excellent material for reading, spelling and writing practice.
The big letters and their little cousins, familiar from last year, are now assembled to brief summaries in colourful printed handwriting.
Reading skills vary most widely at this age, so the class bookshelf caters for all abilities.
Making use of the fact that children learn most readily from each other, those who already read with confidence are sometimes asked to help their peers in paired reading practice.
No Homework
Parents report that their Class 1 children spend time at home repeating things done at school.
And as they are acting out fable songs, modelling a candleholder, picking out a familiar tune on recorder or piano, inventing form drawings, experimenting with “big numbers” and “little letters” … they are singing and reciting items from the Morning Circle.
Such voluntary homework is the best kind.
It shows how deeply children engage with learning content that nourishes their soul. Nothing more is needed.
The Lives of Saints
Picking up the topic of mankind’s moral faculty in a second block later in the year, we arrive at the question: What is it that makes a saint?
St Michael, St George, St Martin, St Nicholas … Who were they, and why do we celebrate their feast day each year?
What makes St Michael unique among saints?
How did a young man change his wild ways to become St Francis?
And what was it like to live in his community of brothers, serving Lady Poverty?
Story by story, the answer appears: A saint is someone who embodies goodness in exemplary form.
Performing St Francis’s Canticle of the Sun in Old Italian and contemporary English sees Class 2 completely engaged with the topic.
And the wording of its verses sometimes echoes in their own creative writing.
Experience First
Adult analysis, intellectual interpretation, critical judgement and personal opinion are avoided, for they belong to the teenage years and the Upper School.
At this age, legends and facts from historic sources are presented as a lively picture that speaks to the children through an emotional experience.
This experience will of itself lead to a deeper understanding in mature years.
Experience first, analysis later is an important motto for all our teaching in the first seven years.
Doing the Right Thing
Children of this age group respond most eagerly to beautiful hymns of praise and prayer.
These help to express feelings of reverence and gratitude as you build, in a non-dogmatic way, a sense for the Spirit of Truth, Beauty, Goodness and Love that has been worshipped since the dawn of time.
Religious forms will be explored in later years.
Right now, the lives of legendary saints create a framework for the voicing of existential questions.
These legends invite the expression of personal feelings, and the beginning of a free and direct relationship with God, unhampered by dogma.
the Goal of Class 2
The children take comfort from their teacher’s unspoken conviction that life has a spiritual dimension that gives it meaning.
Yes, they decide, it does matter to do what is right and good!
And at no other age could they arrive as easily at this deeply felt and all-important conclusion.
