Third grade is an exciting year!  This year the students learn about becoming more independent learners. They begin to understand that their choices and behaviors can affect others. 

Reading:

~ Students are deepening their reading strategies in third grade.  They will be interacting more with the text as they ask questions, make inferences, and locate evidence in the text. 

~ Students will focus on analyzing text and comprehension skills - summarizing, identifying cause/effect relationships, fact/opinion, point of view, and main idea

Writing and Speaking:

~ Three types of writing - narratives, opinion writing, and informative/explanatory writing

~ Students will support their point of view using evidence from the text, organize their sentence structure, conclusions, and word choice

~ Spelling: there will be different spelling groups based on spelling assessment, weekly spelling tests, focus is on finding word patterns, prefix, suffix

~ Cursive - Handwriting Without Tears program

~ Throughout the year the students will engage in collaborative discussions, informative presentations, and speaking in clear, complete sentences

Math:

~ Use enVision Math and Investigations programs

~ Problem solving - students will be refining and applying math strategies

~ Big Focus - developing understanding of multiplication and division relationships and strategies, fleunt in basic addition, subtraction, and multiplication facts

~ Developing an understanding of unit fractions (numerator is 1)

~ Geometry - rectangular arrays, perimeter, and area

~ Describing and analyzing two-dimensional shapes

~ Place value - number sense of larget numbers

Science:

~ First trimester - Matter, Energy, and Light

~ Second trimester - Adaptations and Structures

~ Third trimester - Objects in the Sky (Sun, moon, stars, Earth)

~ Incorporating Next Generation Science Standards and engineering concepts

~ Science Notebooks - developing argumentation skills: making claims, providing evidence, use for science discourse

Social Studies:

~ Physical and human geography

~ Local people and history

~ Basic government