The following link will take you to a section of the Engage NY website, this section has a link to download the NY State Common Core Literacy Standards for all grades. Knowing the standards your child is responsible for in their current grade will help you help them when you are working with them at home. Check out the standards from previous grades as well as the grades ahead. Knowing what they should already know and what they will be learning in the years to come is an important part of their education.
NY State Common Core Literacy Standards
3rd grade is a year where your child will be building upon skills they have learned in previous grades. They will also be learning a handful of new skills. These skills will be used throughout the year in all subjects. Throughout the year we will practice these skill in multiple ways. The repetition of these skills will help your child master each skill and will allow them to learn how to apply those skills to various texts (both with and without support from others).
The following is a brief overview of the Teachers College programs that will be used to teach both Reading & Writing.
This year our school chose to switch to Teachers College for both reading & writing. Teachers College is a curriculum that is based around the workshop model. The workshop model that TC follows has minimal teacher instruction in order to maximize the opportunity students have to actually practice skills learned. In the beginning of the lesson the teacher will spend about 10-15 minutes teaching them the skill for the day. That will be followed up with the active engagement where students will have time to try out the new skill and share their ideas with each other before going off and trying things on their own. Our hopes are that with this new program students will develop a new love a reading and writing as well as a sense of independence.
In writing will start the year off with personal narrative writing. Personal narrative writing is where students write a true story about their own personal experiences. This writing is should be a true story and should focus on a small moment (a small moment is a small chunk of time, the story should not be retelling events that happened over multiple days). The main goal of this unit is to set up routines and good writing practices that can be use throughout the year. As the year progresses we will bounce between both fiction writing and non-fiction writing. Students will be exposed to a variety of types of writing and gain an understanding of key techniques within each type of writing. Some types of writing are informational, opinion and narrative writing. One of the key aspects of TC Writing is that students have a voice in what they write about. In all units they are the ones who decide what topic they will write about, this will help them take ownership of their writing. Having choice also helps create a level of engagement among the students.
In Reading we will start the year off with Building a Reading Life. As does the first unit in writing, this unit helps build the foundational skills of good reading. The language of this unit talks about students building a reading life, or becoming a life long reader. Through the lessons of this unit students will learn to feel comfortable as a reader and select books that are Just Right for them as a reader. We really want students to gain a love of reading and looking at it as something enjoyable rather than something they have to do. Once students understand how to select books for themselves the unit will go over ways good readers check in on their comprehension or understanding of a text as well as common skills such as summarizing, predicting and envision while reading a text. As the year goes on students will alternate between reading fiction and non-fiction books and weaving in the strategies good readers use to help understand the text they are reading. During reading workshop students will also be tracking their ideas and sharing those ideas with others in either partnerships or book clubs. Another big focus in reading this year will be tracking our reading. Students will be asked to keep track of the books they read and the number of pages they read during that time.
We know reading and writing does not come easy to some students, but with practice and support we will become stronger readers and writers. We hope that throughout the year students will learn to see reading and writing in new way and learn that it is not as hard as they may think.