Third Grade

Third grade is a busy year building on the student's first three years of education and learning new things.The religion book, Faith First, presents a spiral approach to learning the Catholic faith. The four pillars of the Catechism of the Catholic Church (creed, sacraments, morality and prayer) are taught. Along with the text, the Sunday gospel is read and discussed each Friday. The reading series meets the reading needs of all students. It includes a comprehensive/systematic plan of instruction using a variety of skills such as, phonics/decoding, predicting/inferring and monitoring/clarifying, questioning, summarizing and evaluating what students have read. Spelling is integrated through the reading series with test words being selected from the stories. During the second quarter students are excited to learn modern cursive writing. English includes an introduction to complete predicates and expands on nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs that were introduced in previous grades. Students continue writing sentences, paragraphs and short essays. The math series focuses on understanding of place value, addition, subtraction, multiplication, division and estimating, measuring and describing objects in space. The children learn to use patterns when solving problems. Students conduct simple probability experiments. The social studies series uses a hands-on approach incorporating laptop computers and projects. The theme for the year is "Our Communities". This includes a unit on California Native Americans. The science book develops the scientific process by asking meaningful questions and conducting hands on investigations. The three strands addressed in the third grade are physical, life and earth science. Third grade has art, P.E., music and computer classes each week.