3rd Grade

Welcome to 3rd grade at Green Woods Charter School!

Third grade is a year of tremendous growth. Your child will be in a supportive environment where their independence, creativity, and problem solving skills are nurtured. Our teachers connect academia to the world around them while interweaving hands on activities and group projects to foster an excitement for learning.

Shana Caltabiano 3rd Grade Teacher

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Atiima Chantharath 3rd Grade Teacher

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Christina Potter 3rd Grade Teacher

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Literacy

Green Woods uses American Reading Company (ARC) Core as our ELA curriculum resource. ARC Core is a framework that provides teachers with a structure to promote inquiry through apprenticeship. The resource provides a scope and sequence aligned to the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), high interest text for teacher modeling, and varying levels of text for student independent work. Along with the framework, ARC provides an Independent Reading Level Assessment that guides teachers through setting individual reading goals for students.

The ARC resources support students as developing readers by providing them with strategies they need to be able to read complex text on their own. Reading, Writing, Listening, Speaking, and Language skills are embedded throughout each unit as students study themes connected to Science, Social Studies, and Literature.

There are 4 units of study throughout the school year. In Third Grade these units consist of Literacy Lab, Weather and Climate, Traditional Tales and World Cultures, and Marine Life.

Math

Green Woods uses the Into Math curriculum built for instruction on the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). This curriculum is an intentional and comprehensive mathematics program that centers on student growth. Growth is maximized when instruction, assessment, and mindset are coordinated and aligned. Throughout the year, students build their conceptual understandings, improve their procedural fluency, and apply their knowledge in meaningful contexts and real-world applications. With more focused learning, every student can achieve at their highest levels.

In Third Grade the Into Math Program focuses on understanding multiplication and area, addition and subtraction strategies and applications, fractions, measurement and data, and geometry.

Science

Students in the third grade will use Bring Science Alive! Exploring Science Practices to examine the environments of organisms and fossils to show how life is supported and changes over time, observe how objects move and interact with forces, travel the globe to experience weather and climate and solve weather-related problems and explore life cycles of diverse organisms and relate how traits of species are affected by inheritance and the environment. They will use science and engineering practices and crosscutting concepts to figure out the science content through active investigations.

Year at a Glance

	Trimester #1	Trimester #2	Trimester #3
Unit Title	Forces and Motion	Weather and Climate	Life Cycles and Traits
Lesson Essential Questions	What do forces do? What happens when forces are balanced and unbalanced? How can you predict patterns of motion? What can magnetic forces do? What can electric forces do?	What makes weather? How is temperature measured? How is wind measured? How are rain and snow measured? How is weather predicted? How are weather and climate related? How does extreme weather affect people? How can people reduce extreme weather damage?	Why do offspring look similar to their parents? How does the environment affect traits? How are traits affected by both inheritance and the environment? Why do some members of a species survive and not others? What are the life cycles of plants? What are the life cycles of animals with backbones? What are the life cycles of animals without backbones?
			Environments and Living Things
			Where do organisms live? How does living in a group help some animals survive? How do environments change? What happens to organisms in changing environments? How do people learn about extinct organisms? What do fossils show about environments of long ago?