George M. Davis Jr. Elementary School

Our third grade reading curriculum supports the crucial transition children make from learning to read to reading to learn. Children ramp up their reading skills by immersing themselves in within-reach fiction books while working on word solving, vocabulary development, envisionment, and prediction.  Our non-fiction units address essential skills for reading expository nonfiction, such as ascertaining main ideas, recognizing text infrastructure, comparing texts, and thinking critically, as well as the skills for reading narrative nonfiction, such as determining importance by using knowledge of story structure.

Our third grade writing curriculum extends students’ work while engaging them more fully in the complete writing process.  This includes an increasing emphasis on drafting and revising their work. The major goals for the year are to foster high-level thinking, refine strategies for content-area writing, while supporting greater independence and fluency.  The third-grade units of study take into account that many third-graders are writing on full sheets of notebook paper and in writers notebooks for the first time.

Our third grade math curriculum continues to extend the students’ knowledge of place value and the number system to 1,000, as well as adding and subtracting accurately and efficiently.  Additionally, students are working on understanding the meaning of multiplication, modeling multiplication using arrays, and understanding the inverse relationship between multiplication and division.  Furthermore, students work on identifying arithmetic patterns and solving multi-step problems.  Students will also grasp an understanding of fractions as numbers and as equal parts of a whole; reasoning about equivalent fractions; comparing fractions; and using notation to model fractions and fraction relationships.