Our reading curriculum includes explicit instruction in lessons through a variety of genres with a focus on comprehension and vocabulary followed by time to practice skills taught, conference with teachers, and reflect and set goals. In third grade, students engage in novel studies, further developing their decoding, vocabulary, fluency, comprehension, and reading stamina. Daily oral language development is practiced through language activities and skills practice. Students continue to develop comprehension strategies to understand complex fiction and non-fiction texts including: writer’s craft skills, cause and effect, classify and categorize, compare and contrast, fact and opinion, main idea and details, making inferences, sequence, asking and answering questions, clarifying, making connections, predicting/confirming predictions, summarizing, and visualizing. Students are assessed through weekly reading assignments/tests. Teachers administer the STAR Reading Test- a computer adaptive assessment that measures key aspects of a student’s knowledge of reading and language. The STAR reading test is given at the beginning, middle, and end of the year and it is used to help understand a student’s strengths and needs in reading.
Accelerated Reader is a digital enrichment program that students may access. Student’s may choose a book from the AR list of books, read it at his/her own pace, and then complete a quiz on the book. Points are awarded based on the number of questions answered correctly. The points accumulate to reach milestones and awards. Students are assigned individual goals based on their reading levels.
Through our writing curriculum, third grade students master the process of writing a complete paragraph with a topic sentence, detail sentences, and a concluding sentence. Grammar, usage, mechanics, and spelling remains a crucial part of the ELA portion of each lesson. Students practice different types of writing including poetry, friendly letters, fairy tales, persuasive, narrative, expository, and descriptive writing. Cursive writing is taught in third grade.
The first writing unit, Crafting True Stories, extends students’ work with personal narrative while engaging them more fully in the complete writing process, with increasing emphasis on drafting and revising their work. In the second unit, The Art of Information Writing, youngsters write chapter books that synthesize a wide variety of information and learn to section their topics into subtopics. They are supported in this challenging work because they are writing about topics on which they have firsthand, personal knowledge: dogs, soccer, gymnastics. Changing the World: Persuasive Speeches, Petitions, and Editorials rallies third-graders to use their newfound abilities to gather and organize information to persuade people about causes the children believe matter: stopping bullying, recycling, saving dogs at the SPCA. The final unit in third grade, Once Upon a Time: Adapting and Writing Fairy Tales, uses familiar fairy tales to explore techniques of fiction writing such as writing in scenes, employing an omniscient narrator to orient readers, using story structure to create tension, and crafting figurative language to convey mood.
Through our math curriculum, Progress in Mathematics, students explore concepts in place value, addition and subtraction, geometry, fractions, multiplication and division, measurement and time, and statistics and probability. The approach used builds deep conceptual understanding of key math skills and concepts at a developmentally appropriate level. Skills taught: place value, addition, subtraction, multiplication concepts and facts, division concepts and facts, more multiplication and division facts, statistics and probability, measurement and time, geometry, multiply by one digit, divide by one digit, fractions, decimal, algebra readiness, and problem solving.
In third grade, students become scientists as they observe, classify, and record data collected through science investigations. The core areas of the third grade science curriculum include: animals, plants, water, weather, rocks, natural resources, space, and more! Social Studies concepts taught in third grade include geography and South Carolina history.
