Skip To Main Content

Grade 3 Curriculum

Grade 3

LANGUAGE ARTS
The purpose of the grade three language arts curriculum is to ensure that students are proficient in the four basic points of literacy, namely reading, writing, listening, and speaking. We intend for students to read with understanding in all genres for the purpose of gaining knowledge and for personal enjoyment.

SOCIAL STUDIES
The purpose of the third grade social studies curriculum is to help students develop an appreciation and understanding of their historical past, and to explore the history of Massachusetts focusing on their local community and significant historical figures.

MATH
In grade 3, the focus is on four critical areas: (1) developing understanding of multiplication and division and strategies for multiplication and division within 100; (2) developing understanding of fractions, especially unit fractions (fractions with numerator 1); (3) developing understanding of the structure of rectangular arrays and of area; and (4) describing and analyzing two-dimensional shapes.

SCIENCE
Students are able to organize and use data to describe typical weather conditions expected during a particular season. By applying their understanding of weather-related hazards, students are able to make a claim about the merit of a design solution that reduces the impacts of such hazards. Students are expected to develop an understanding of the similarities and differences of organisms’ life cycles. An understanding that organisms have different inherited traits, and that the environment can also affect the traits that an organism develops, is acquired by students at this level.

In addition, students are able to construct an explanation using evidence for how the variations in characteristics among individuals of the same species may provide advantages in surviving, finding mates, and reproducing. Students are expected to develop an understanding of types of organisms that lived long ago and also about the nature of their environments.

The crosscutting concepts of patterns; cause and effect; scale, proportion, and quantity; systems and system models; interdependence of science, engineering, and technology; and influence of engineering, technology, and science on society and the natural world are called out as organizing concepts for these disciplinary core ideas.