During the first semester students will continue to build their vocabulary through the study of folktales, fables, myths, informational text, dramas, poems, and stories. They will recount stories and ask and answer questions to demonstrate their knowledge of text. They will compare and contract themes, setting and plots and distinguish their own point of view from that of the author of the text. Students will also gain information from illustrations and describe logical connections between sentence and paragraphs. They will also be introduced to writing in cursive. During the second semester students will continue to apply phonics and grammar concepts with a focus on special vowel sounds, prefixes, and suffixes. Students will continue to build writing skills by responding to reading and utilizing a broadened vocabulary in authentic writing activities where they compare and contrast stories and use process writing to compose original work. They will read with accuracy and fluency to support comprehension as they solidify their understanding within context of the stories they read. By the end of the year, our third-grade student will read and comprehend informational texts, including history/social studies, science, and technical texts independently and proficiently. Students will report on a topic using descriptive details and speaking clearly and in complete sentences.

Third grade science introduces students to experimentation as they journey through the earth and its many miracles.  They will begin by learning about the earth, the sun and the moon.  By participating in simple experiments students will explore the water cycle, gravity, the weather and it’s patterns, various types of terrain, and the role of plants in the production of oxygen and their importance to human survival.  Learners will expand their knowledge through video, pictures, short readings, projects, and hands on experiments.  Learners will understand that experiments require the use of instruments, observation, recording, and drawing evidence based conclusions.  Grade 3 science provides students with the opportunity to expand their minds and see for themselves the way that science is a part of their everyday lives.

In third grade, social studies students will begin to explore the basic fundamentals of social studies including geography, civics, and economics. Learners will begin by looking at the beginning of civilization and examining the ancient Hebrew civilization, the Phoenicians, and the Kush tribe of ancient Africa. They will then move on to examining the Native American tribes of the Cherokee, Sioux, and Hopi. Students will also look at the first explorers of the Americas and learn about the beginning of the United States. In the first semester students will learn important geographical factors in the ancient civilizations, Native American tribes and in the developing United States. Students will increase their skills by creating maps and looking at the landscapes. They will take a close look at their own personal heritage by mapping their ancestry. Learners will follow a step-by-step approach for successfully completing each lesson, which includes storytelling, repetition, projects, arts and crafts, and videos.

Students will build flexibility with numbers as they master addition and subtraction facts as well as multiplication and division facts. Students will understand relationships between addition and subtraction, multiplication and addition and multiplication and division as they learn to borrow, carry, and regroup in order to find sums and differences of two whole numbers up to 10,000. Students will also comprehend the place value of base ten numbers up to 1,000,000 in order to find patterns and make estimations. Lastly, they will implement a 4-step approach to solving problems and express numbers differently including translating them into Roman Numerals or expressing them as ordinal numbers.