WM 3rd Grade Curriculum Update
April 2019
Reading and Writing
Reading:
In Reader’s Workshop students will be starting a new unit: Reading and Role-Playing Fairy Tales, Folktales, Fables, and Fantasy. The first part of the unit immerses students into the world of folktales and fairytales. Together with a partner, they will read multiple texts in the genre looking for common elements and themes as they retell texts encompassing narrative elements. The second part of the unit students will be stepping into the character’s shoes, feeling, thinking, and acting in order to gain a deeper understanding of them. Students will be working on fluency and demonstrate comprehension by reading with expression and prosody. By the end of the unit students will work in book clubs working together to consider the lessons characters learn and to compare how different authors explore similar morals in very different ways. Students will learn to compare and contrast characters, storylines, morals and lessons in two or more versions of the same story by different authors.
Writing:
In Writer’s Workshop students will be starting a new unit : Writing About Reading. Students will start the unit off by writing letters about characters they’ve met in their books, formulating opinions and supporting their ideas, providing reasons, and using details and examples from the text to support their claims. Writing workshop will look very similar to reader’s workshop in that students will be learning to read and reread closely to come up with more ideas for opinions, more details and evidence to support their opinions, as well as fun conventions that authors and illustrators use to fancy up and make their writing interesting. Finally, students will move away from persuasive letters into more of an essay format as they write to persuade others that their favorite books are worthy of awards.
Math
Unit 6: Geometry
In this unit your child will be working on the following skills:
Identify and describe, draw and create 2-D shapes based on their defining features.
Explore the area of shapes, especially rectangles
Split whole shapes into 2,3, or 4 equal parts called halves, thirds or fourth/quarters
Recognize that equal parts of identical wholes do not need to be the same shape
Science
3rd Graders rotate through these FOSS Science kits throughout the year.
Energy and Matter: Students learn about the transfer of energy from one form to another.
Sound: Students learn how sound is generated, how it is made louder and softer, higher and lower.
Water: Students learn the properties, changes, and interactions of water.
Social Studies
Our next unit will be studying marketplace and local production in social studies. The big ideas of this unit are: producers and consumers depend on each other, people make money in different ways to pay for goods and services, raw materials become a product, products come from a producer, wants vs. needs, and families have to budget their money.
LMC - Library
We’ll experiment with different methods of organizing materials and ideas, and we’ll examine how these ideas apply to the organization of library books.
Music
learning about music, instruments, and cultures from other countries. All students will learn about Ghana in West Africa, and then each class will vote on two other countries they’d like to study: Caribbean Islands, France, Germany, Brazil, Russia, Japan, or Israel.
Technology
Students will use spreadsheet tools or graphing programs to represent and analyze data. Students will continue to strengthen their typing speed and words per minute.
Art
PE
Students will participate in Spring fitness testing and our Track & Field Unit. We will try and get outside as much as possible as well.
*Just a reminder that the 3rd Grade Swimming Unit is this month! Swim dates are: April 2, 4, 8, 10, 12, 16! Please send along a suite & towel (goggles optional) on swim days. If your child needs a suit and towel (or forgets one) no worries! The pool has plenty to borrow and washes them after every use. :)