Third

Curriculum

In Third Grade, students are starting to transition from learning computer basics to applying these basics in various programs and platforms. At the beginning of the year, we spend the first month going over the hardware and software our devices use, as well as going over proper keyboarding techniques.

Once students are familiar with classroom expectations and routines, we jump right into online skills! Students in 3rd grade are expected to log into their computers with their district provided usernames and passwords. We encourage all 3rd grade students to memorize both their username and passwords! The first digital skill Third Graders are exposed to is keyboarding. Students spend 10 to 15 minutes each week practicing their keyboarding skills, and each month they take a timed test to track their progress. Students are responsible for taking a 3 minute typing test and then recording their Words Per Minute (WPM) score on a digital tracker; this helps students take ownership of their learning and encourages them to meet their end of the year goal!

While working on their keyboarding skills, Third Grade students also start learning about Digital Citizenship and online safety. We spend the entire months of October and November going over these topics and why they're important. We use a variety of stories, videos and discussions to help students understand these topics. Third Grade students learn the importance of having a strong password, and also begin to learn about why keeping your Digital Footprint clean is important.

These skills bring us to the month of December, which is where a shift in curriculum occurs! In December each year, techies worldwide celebrate something called "The Hour of Code," which is a campaign organized by Code.org to inspire students to learn more about coding. Believe it or not, our Third Grade students spend the month learning to code basic computer programs! Teaching them these basic programming skills is an important prerequisite for our January curriculum, which is all about programming robots! Students will be working with age appropriate robots, and will be collaborating with one another to program their robot through an obstacle course in the classroom!

After our robotics unit, Third Grade students shift into working with both keyboarding and the online platform the MCAS tests uses. In order to support classroom teachers, we spend time going over the various digital tools the MCAS testing site has. This gives students a lot more confidence in themselves and their skills come April and May when they take their very first MCAS test!

Our last unit in Third Grade focuses on online research! Students will be identifying a topic they're interested in, research the topic, and then will be creating a Google Slides presentation about the topic to share with their classmates. This project will span a few months, and will teach students proper research methods, using both online resources and physical resources from our school library! This project not only helps them with research skills, it will also help to reinforce the skills they've been learning within the Google Suite. This project takes us to the end of the school year, and helps to pull together all of the skills they learned throughout the year.

Online Resources