Third Grade Curriculum Overview

At Monticello Academy, we believe in academic excellence as well as the emotional and social development of a student.  The academic curriculum that we implement in our program is based on the California State Standards.  Being a developmental based program, our curriculum is gauged in accordance to the educational level of each individual class every year as they progress from one grade level to the next.  Our curriculum will vary year to year depending on the developmental ability and level of the upcoming grade.  This overview will allow you to have a general understanding of what your child will learn throughout the school year.

Language Arts
 
Reading

The main emphasis for reading at the third grade level is on word recognition in that students are reading narrative and expository text aloud.  When reading, they are taught to read with fluency and accuracy with appropriate pacing, intonation, and expression.

Vocabulary Development

In the third grade, students are learning about root words, word origins, derivations, synonyms, antonyms, and idioms.  They also learn to use thesauruses to find related words and concepts.  Students learn how to distinguish and interpret words with multiple meaning. 

Reading Comprehension

At the third grade level, students will be working on compare and contrast, cause and effect, sequential or chronological order, and proposition and support to strengthen comprehension.  Students are learning to make predictions and hypotheses based on the given information.

Literary Response and Analysis

Students are now learning to describe the structural differences of various imaginative forms of literature by being able to define figurative language and identifying its use in the literary works.  They are developing the skills of comparing and contrasting tales from different cultures.

Writing

Building from the previous level, students are starting to write multiple paragraph compositions with a focus, an organizational structure, and point of view.  They are starting to write cursive fluidly and legibly.  Students learn how to write narratives, responses, information, and summaries.  In doing this, they gain understanding in learning how to use various reference materials and improve in their writing by editing and revising.   At the same time, they are continuing to polish their ability in sentence structure, grammar, punctuation, capitalization, and spelling.

Listening and Speaking

As students progress to the third grade, they are learning to make narrative and informational presentations as well as poem and book summaries orally through the use of proper volume, pitch, phrasing, pace, modulation, and gestures.  Students are now starting to ask thoughtful questions and responding with relevance.  They are also capable of giving precise directions and instructions.

History-Social Science

In the third grade history-social science curriculum, the main focus is on continuity and change.  Students will be learning more about our connections to the past and the ways in which local, regional, and national government and traditions have developed and left their marks on our current society.  This knowledge helps students to understand the role of rules and law in our lives and the basic structure of the U.S. government.  They focus on the physical and cultural landscape of California.  Through their understanding about California, they eventually will study about the American Indians, arrival of the immigrants and their settlements, and the impact they have had in forming the character of our contemporary society.

Mathematics

After reviewing concepts previously learned in the second grade curriculum, our third grade students grasp a stronger understanding for large numbers and addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division of whole numbers.  They will learn to describe and compare simple fractions and decimals.  Students will gain further knowledge in comprehension about properties of and the relationship between plane geometric figures.  At this point, they will be able to collect, represent, and analyze data to answer questions.

Science

Third grade science begins with the knowledge that science makes the world understandable.  They begin their year establishing a foundation for the understanding of the structure of matter and the forces of interaction.  They study about the properties of light (affect of light on perception of direction, shadow, and color).  Students will further their comprehension of ecology by discovering about different environments, such as ocean, deserts, tundra, forest, wetlands, and grasslands, and how different organisms adapt to these environment.   The instructional materials will cultivate student’s ability to read science material independently, draw conclusion and answers to questions with literal and inferential comprehension, and making predictions closer to the actual result rather than just making random guesses.