Grade 3 Newsletter
Language Arts!
Reading Workshop: Building a Reading Life
This unit launches the Reading Workshop in third grade. Students will begin to build their own identities as people who care about reading and will become familiar with the structures, routines, and habits of a richly literate reading workshop. Students will learn to choose books that are just right, to collect data on their reading rate and volume, and then to study that data to set reading goals. Later on in the unit, the focus will shift to reading comprehension. Students will strengthen their skills in envisioning, predicting, and retelling.
Writing Workshop: Crafting True Stories
The unit will begin by establishing the structures and routines of third-grade writing workshop. Students will learn ways to generate personal narrative entries and they will capture those ideas in their writer's notebook. They will also reflect on what is going well, what is hard, and how they might ramp up their work by looking closely at our mentor text, Come On, Rain! by Karen Hesse. Later in the unit, they will learn to reread their entries, select seed ideas, and then to develop that idea by story-telling over and over again. They will be introduced to paragraphing as a way of organizing and they will learn to elaborate on their paragraphs by adding action, dialogue, thoughts, and feelings.
Math!
Chapter 1: Numbers to 10,000
Students are studying numbers to 10,000. They are learning to count, read, and write numbers to 10,000. They are also learning to compare and order numbers.
Chapter 2: Mental Math and Estimation
Students are learning about mental addition and subtraction, as well as estimation. They will learn to add and subtract 2-digit numbers mentally, with or without regrouping. They will round numbers to estimate sums and differences. Finally, this chapter will teach them to also use front end-estimation.
Chapter 3: Addition to 10,000
Students will learn to add numbers up to 10,000. They will add without regrouping. Afterwards, they will add with regrouping in ones, tens, and hundreds.
Chapter 4: Subtraction up to 10,000
Students will learn to subtract numbers within 10,000. They will start out subtracting numbers without regrouping. Later, they will subtract with regrouping in the ones, tens, hundreds, and thousands.
ixl.com
is a great resource for students. They can log into their accounts to sharpen their math skills right at home! Please contact me if you need the username and password.
Content!
Matter Everywhere!
In this unit students will compare and contrast the properties of solids, liquids, and gases. Then they will learn to classify materials based on their observable properties. They will learn to carry out simple tests to determine if materials dissolve, sink, or float in water. Finally, they will design and conduct fair tests to investigate the absorbancy of different materials, write conclusions based on evidence, and analyze why similar investigations might produce different results.
Native Americans!
Students will learn all about the first Americans throughout this unit of study. They will become experts on Native American culture and groups from different regions and times. They will explore how climate, location, and physical surroundings within each region affect each group’s way of life. Students will also compare the lives of Native Americans across regions and to their own lives. At the end of the unit, students will pick one Native American region to research and prepare a short group presentation to teach their peers about what they learned.