Reason abstractly and quantitatively.
2nd Grade

Mathematically proficient students in 2nd grade:
  • Make sense of quantities and relationships while solving tasks. 
  • This involves two processes- decontexualizing and contextualizing. 
Decontextualizing
In Second Grade, students represent situations by decontextualizing tasks into numbers and symbols.

For example, in the task, “There are 25 children in the cafeteria and 
they are joined by 17 more children. How many students are in the cafeteria? ” Second Grade students translate that situation into an equation, such as: 25 + 17 = __ and then solve the problem. 
Contextualizing
In Second Grade, students contextualize situations 
during the problem solving process. 

For example, while solving the task above, students can refer to the context of the task to determine that they need to subtract 19 since 19 children leave. The processes of reasoning also other areas of 
mathematics such as determining the length of quantities when measuring with standard units.
Picture
Copies of this poster are available through Heartland AEA11.