NA

It is wonderful how each book in the series expands each subject without a huge review of the prior year's lessons. Each section starts by reminding the child of what he already learned or knows and then adds to it. When I came across Longfellow's poem "Paul Revere's Ride", I realized that I had never had to read this in school, or if I had, I remembered only the first line and the line 'one/ if by land, and two, if by sea" in the first stanza. I had no idea whether the signal had been one or two lights! [Turns out that it was 2.] It's a wonderful poem, full of movement and excitement. I can imagine a class acting out this poem with a narrator and props. Anyway, I feel like I got to fill in some gaps of my own (ha!)

I think, overall, this book is good for checking that there are no big gaps in your child's education and this book is really just the minimum. It is not a complete curriculum nor is it a textbook, but the basics that should be expected from any child at this grade. The Montessori curriculum that my daughter had at her school covers pretty much all of this and more, which I think would be true for any really decent school. ( )

I used to think we needed a checklist to validate educational progress. Although this did convey the level of understanding, it very quickly turned me off from the Core Knowledge approach to education. The first impression matches what we see in most modern textbooks. The fonts are big, the topics arbitrary, and the treatment simplistic. With text like this for children and their mentoring parents (how many !'s does one need?), it's no wonder our educational establishment is in trouble. Get your breadth children. Cover all topics enough to have a working understanding. But don't get it from here. ( )

I didn't read this cover-to-cover, but flipped throught it to get an idea of how closely my son's knowledge matched up with what the author feels he should have known, by this age. (The answer; pretty good. We'd read several of the fiction selections already, and he was on track as regards math. Way ahead in some other areas, although his knowledge of American history is a bit lacking by the author's standards, but that's because I've focused more on world history when we were homeschooling).

This appears to be a good book, one which could be used as a guideline for a curriculum, perhaps even an entire curriculum, with some supplemental materials. ( )

Fundamentals of good 2nd grade education