Curriculum

Language Arts

This year your child will spend time learning to read a wide variety of books and respond both individually and in a small group to the text. Each child will spend time during reading focused on their 20 book challenge in which we push the students to read 20 books across several of the genres in books that are on their level. In writing we will focus on making each student become a better writer through the use of technology, good grammar, and imagination! Each child will also be assessed and assigned a word study list for each week as well as participate in Daily Oral Language discussions each day. The frequency of both the Word Study and the DOL help to reinforce skills that the students will need as they begin to become stronger writers and begin to edit and revise their work on their own.

Science

Science this year will be jam packed with scientific investigations that help us learn about earth and life phases, soil and erosion, energy, and simple machines. We will also cover matter, the moon's phases, and the water cycle. We have exciting experiments throughout the year such as Gobstopper Labs, Veggie Derby, and Peterson's Pond. One of our Project Based Learning units will also focus on conservation this year and take place in the Spring.

Social Studies

We will spend our year learning about wonderful ancient civilizations such as Mali, Greece, and Rome as well as famous explorers. During the explorer unit we will spend time with our big Galleon project that we do every year. Our second Project Based Learning Unit is Flight and will connect with Social Studies through our unit with map skills and grids. We will also learn about the three branches government, review the geography of the world, and study economics. Get excited for things like Ancients Day!

Math

Math this year will be a continuation of the skills that your student has been acquiring since kindergarten. We will continue to work on addition and subtraction facts, but we will also be working on multiplication and division facts later this year. We will also cover geometry, graphing, place value, money, and measurement just to name a few! It is important that you and your child continue to review math facts every night as we go through third grade to make classwork easier for him/her to handle. For most of the units we will also do a pretest to determine if students have already mastered a set of skills. If students are already sufficient in ALL of the skills taught in 3rd grade then we will contract out and give students an opportunity to work in small groups or independently on more challenging material.