GRADE THREE CURRICULUM                          

1. LANGUAGE ARTS / READING

• Reading Workshop - independent reading / book responses
• Reading Street: Comprehension Skills / Vocabulary
• Literature Circles
• Periodicals (Weekly Reader)

2. WRITING

• Spelling component to Reading Street
• Writer’s Notebooks - variety of publishing
• Narrative / Persuasive / Expository Units
• Daily Edit – mechanics / grammar / punctuation
• Prompts - quarterly
• Reading responses: “Jots” (connection to literature)
• Country Reports / note taking
• Math explanations and descriptions (problem solving)

3. MATH

• Math In Focus
• Anchor Tasks
• CPA: Concrete-Pictoral-Abstract
• MiF Explanation video

4. SOCIAL STUDIES

• International Unit of Study (Country Reports)
• Daily Geography
• Map Skills

5. SCIENCE

• Rocks & Minerals
• Plant Growth & Development
• Chemical Tests
• Sound

PA Academic Standards: Grade 3

Reading: Fiction

• Ask and answer questions about the text.
• Make inferences from text; referring to text to support responses. 
• Determine the main idea of a text; recount the key details and explain how they support the main idea. 
• Describe characters in a story and explain how their actions contribute to the sequence of events. 
• Explain how a series of events, concepts, or steps in a procedure is connected within a text, using language that pertains to time, sequence, and cause/effect. 
• Explain the point of view of the author. 
• Recount poems, dramas, or stories, including fables, folktales, and myths from diverse cultures; determine the central message, lesson, or moral and explain how it is conveyed through key details in the text. 
• Compare and contrast the themes, settings, and plots of stories written by the same author about the same or similar characters. 

Reading: Non-Fiction

• Use information gained from illustrations, maps, photographs, and the words in a text to demonstrate understanding of the text.
• Compare and contrast the most important points and key details presented in two texts on the same topic. 

Writing

• Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in grade-level text, distinguishing literal from nonliteral meaning as well as shades of meaning among related words. 
• Determine or clarify the meaning of unknown and multiple-meaning words and phrases based on grade level reading and content, choosing flexibly from a range of strategies and tools. 
• Explain the function of nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs in general and their functions in particular sentences. 
• Form and use regular and irregular plural nouns. 
• Use abstract nouns (e.g., childhood). 
• Form and use regular and irregular verbs. 
• Form and use the simple verb tenses (e.g., I walked; I walk; I will walk). 
• Ensure subject-verb and pronoun-antecedent agreement. * 
• Form and use comparative and superlative adjectives and adverbs, and choose between them depending on what is to be modified. 
• Use coordinating and subordinating conjunctions. 
• Produce simple, compound, and complex sentences. 
• Capitalize appropriate words in titles. 
• Use commas in addresses. 
• Use commas and quotation marks in dialogue. 
• Form and use possessives. 
• Use conventional spelling for high-frequency and other studied words and for adding suffixes to base words (e.g., sitting, smiled, cries, happiness). 
• Use spelling patterns and generalizations (e.g., word families, position-based spellings, syllable patterns, ending rules, meaningful word parts) in writing words

Math

• Round two- and three-digit whole numbers to the nearest ten or hundred, respectively.   
• Add two- and three-digit whole numbers
• Subtract two- and three-digit numbers from three-digit whole numbers.   
• Multiply one-digit whole numbers by two-digit multiples of 10 (from 10 through 90).   
• Order a set of whole numbers from least to greatest or greatest to least.
• Represent fractions on a number line (limit denominators to 2, 3, 4, 6, and 8; limit numerators to whole numbers less than the denominator; and no simplification necessary)
• Recognize and generate simple equivalent fractions (limit denominators to 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8).
• Compare two fractions with the same denominator (limit denominators to 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, and 8).
• Represent and solve problems involving multiplication and division.
• Apply the commutative property of multiplication 
• Apply the associative property of multiplication
• Solve two-step word problems using the four operations.
• Assess the reasonableness of answers. 
• Recognize rhombi, rectangles, and squares as examples of quadrilaterals and/or draw examples of quadrilaterals that do not belong to any of these subcategories. 
• Tell, show, and/or write time (analog) to the nearest minute.   
• Calculate elapsed time to the minute in a given situation (60 minutes or less). 
•  Measure and estimate liquid volumes and masses of objects using standard units (cups [c], pints [pt], quarts [qt], gallons [gal], ounces [oz.], and pounds [lb]) and metric units (liters [l], grams [g], and kilograms [kg]).   
• Use a ruler to measure lengths to the nearest quarter inch or centimeter. 
• Compare total values of combinations of coins (penny, nickel, dime, and quarter) and/or dollar bills less than $5.00.   
• Make change for an amount up to $5.00 with no more than $2.00 change given 
• Round amounts of money to the nearest dollar. 
• Complete a scaled pictograph and a scaled bar graph to represent a data set with several categories (scales limited to 1, 2, 5, and 10). 
• Solve one- and two-step problems using information to interpret data presented in scaled pictographs and scaled bar graphs (scales limited to 1, 2, 5, and 10). 
• Measure areas by counting unit squares (square cm, square m, square in., square ft, and non-standard square units). 
• Multiply side lengths to find areas of rectangles with whole-number side lengths
• Solve problems involving perimeters of polygons.
• Find the perimeter given the side lengths, find an unknown side length.