Phonics Road: Level 2

(For review of Level 1, see below)
Level 2: With each level of Phonics Road, you can expect to have the workload increase slightly. I find the transition between the first two levels to be the easiest. I am working through this level with my 7 year old boy now. The spelling/grammar portions take a half hour or less, and we spend a half hour on the literature study, which is mostly completed on his own.
Blueprints: You continue with the five words a day dictation model, not much changed from last level except the difficulty of the words. This usually takes us just a few minutes.

Building Codes: This year you will continue reviewing phonics rules and recording them in this section. Mrs. Beers introduces cursive writing the last few weeks of this level and it is used in the rest of the volumes. My older son took to this immediately and now only writes in cursive. My second son still prints, but the introduction to cursive was good for him. We'll see what son #3 does in a few weeks!
Framing Codes: In this section, you will record a new concept to your student: grammar. Mrs. Beers begins to introduce concepts such as nouns, verbs, adjectives, and even predicate nouns and predicate adjectives. Your student will also begin a very easy form of sentence diagramming. This will -- like everything else -- increase in difficulty through the levels until Level 4, which appeared to be college level diagramming to me. But I digress...
Composition: The student will be writing sentences in this section which correspond to the grammar concepts being taught in the Framing Codes. It is here they will also implement some light diagramming and rewriting skills.
Literature study: This level, instead of the First Readers, the student is reading Little House in the Big Woods and doing a literature study. Parents of little boys need not fear. None of my three very masculine, very rough, very boy boys was put off by reading this. In fact, they all loved it. I can't stress enough that each child is different, and you will likely complete each section differently with each one. With my present student, the first change I made was the literature study pages are not kept in the back of his notebook. I found that it made the binder too tight and it was difficult to turn the pages. Instead, I put all the pages in a separate binder at the beginning of the year and he works right out of that. Another change I made is he does not read out loud to me like the lesson plans instruct. I have four children, and there's just not time for that. Thirdly, this son is such a voracious reader that rather than having him read a small section each day, I have him read the chapter in it's entirety, then he does the pages that correspond to the chapter. We often refer back to the book as he's doing the work.
Make sure you adjust your schedule so you have the time for the literature study. It is WELL worth the effort. If you are organizationally challenged like me, I highly recommend Managers Of Their Homes on which I wrote a review which you can read here.