From the Introduction:

"What kind of knowledge and skills can your child be expected to learn in second grade at school? How can you help your child at home? These are questions that we try to answer in this book. It presents the sort of knowledge and skills—in literature, reading and writing, history and geography, visual arts, music, mathematics, and science—that should be at the core of a challenging second-grade education.

Because children and localities differ greatly across this big, diverse country, so do second-grade classrooms. But all communities, including classrooms, require some common ground for communication and learning. In this book we present the specific shared knowledge that hundreds of parents and teachers across the nation have agreed upon for American second graders. This core is not a comprehensive prescription for everything that every second grader needs to know. Such a complete prescription would be rigid and undesirable. But the book does offer a solid common ground that will enable young students to become active, successful learners in their classroom community and later in the larger communities we live in—town, state, nation, and world."