What the Scott Foresman Second Grade Street Pacing Guide Actually Is
The Scott Foresman Second Grade Street Pacing Guide is a scope-and-sequence document that maps out which lessons, skills, and assessments occur week by week throughout the second grade math year. It is designed around the Street series curriculum, which organizes instruction around number sense, operations, measurement, geometry, and data. The pacing guide tells you when to hit each benchmark so you are not scrambling in March trying to cover fractions you were supposed to introduce back in November. I used this for about five years across three different districts. The pacing guide itself is mostly straightforward. It breaks the year into units, assigns each unit a recommended number of weeks, and drops in assessment windows. The problem is that the standard version assumes you have roughly 180 instructional days, a consistent substitution protocol, and students who are already operating at or near grade level on day one. None of those assumptions hold in my experience.
Scott Foresman Second Grade Street Pacing Guide
When you first pull up the pacing guide, you will see something like this structure: Units one through seven or eight depending on the edition, each with a set number of lessons, a mid-unit check, and a cumulative assessment at the end. The Street series bundles concepts together more intentionally than older editions, which means you cannot simply skip a lesson without losing the scaffolding the next one depends on. The first thing I did was overlay the pacing guide onto my own school calendar. I marked the days we lost to state testing, assemblies, winter break, and spring break. Then I took the suggested weeks per unit and adjusted them to fit the days I actually had. This is where most teachers get tripped up. The pacing guide numbers are targets, not law. If Unit 3 says ten days and you only have six because of testing, you are going to need to prioritize. You drop the low-yield practice days and keep the direct instruction and targeted intervention blocks intact.
How to Use It Without Losing Your Mind
I started by pulling the curriculum map from my Pearson portal and printing the pacing guide on graph paper. I color coded each unit. Red was for skills that required reteaching, blue was for assessment windows, and green was for extension work. Then I went through the second grade standards myself and flagged the ones that showed up on the district benchmark exam. Everything else was secondary. That process alone cut my planning time down from about four hours a week to closer to two. One specific problem I ran into was with the fraction unit. The pacing guide allocated three days to introduce halves and fourths using partitioning models. In practice, my students needed at least five days before they could move into comparing fractions. I had originally been ready to skip ahead and then realize I was walking into the winter benchmark with kids who could not tell you which piece was larger. What I did was borrow two days from the geometry measurement unit, which turned out to be fine because my students already had some exposure to that from first grade. The pacing guide does not account for your students knowing things already. You have to do that calibration yourself. Another issue that comes up every year is the data and graphing unit. The Street series treats bar graphs and picture graphs in the same block, but the pacing guide gives them roughly equal time. In reality, second graders can handle picture graphs in about a week. Bar graphs with scales that increment by twos or fives take longer. I shifted the schedule so that picture graphs got compressed and bar graphs got an extra session. It is a small change but it prevented the kind of rushed instruction where students memorize how to fill in a chart without understanding what a scale represents.
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Where the Pacing Guide Falls Short
The biggest limitation is that it does not differentiate for English language learners or for students working below grade level in foundational skills. Second grade math relies heavily on addition and subtraction fluency. If a chunk of your class is still counting on fingers for facts within twenty, the pacing guide will walk right over them. I kept a running list of students who needed fluency work and scheduled ten minute daily drills during independent practice time. That meant I had to pull those ten minutes from somewhere else in the unit, usually from the practice sets at the end of a lesson. The trade off was worth it. A second blind spot is the assumption that every lesson gets the full allocated time. Some of the Street lessons are dense. A single lesson on elapsed time can easily take two class periods if you are doing it properly. The pacing guide sometimes assigns one day. When that happened, I would split the lesson across two days and remove the worksheet portion, replacing it with a quick oral check. Skipping the worksheet is not ideal, but it is better than rushing through and having nothing but blank stares.
What to Do Before You Start Using It
Get the curriculum access code from your district coordinator if you do not already have it. The pacing guide lives in the teacher resources section alongside the lesson plans, diagnostic tools, and intervention packets. Download the version that matches your exact textbook edition because the pacing can shift between releases. The 2019 edition and the 2022 edition have different unit orders in places, and if you are mixing materials from different years your assessments will not line up with the pacing guide timeline. Run the placement diagnostic that comes with Street before you begin any unit. The results tell you which skills students already have and which ones need front loading. I once started the multiplication and division unit based on the pacing guide without checking, and half my class had no idea what repeated addition looked like visually. We lost almost two weeks figuring that out while the other half of the class was bored. The pacing guide assumes a baseline that does not always exist.
Final Notes on Practice
The pacing guide is a tool, not a contract. Treat it as a starting point for your own planning. Adjust the weeks based on your actual calendar, flag the skills your students struggle with most, and shift time accordingly. Keep your focus on the standards that matter for the benchmark and be willing to drop or compress the rest. The Street series is structured well enough that if you preserve the core instruction days, the rest can flex without collapsing the whole year.
