Third Grade
Third Grade Overview
Third grade is a year of exciting transition for our students at FRA. Throughout this year, our students will attain greater independence and responsibility as they delve deeper into all subject areas. At our core, we look to nurture and build a community of third graders who develop a lifelong love of learning. We seek to both challenge and support our students as they think critically, encourage them in utilizing their abstract ideas, and guide them as they explore new facets of problem solving and innovation. At the heart of our inclusive Christian community, we seek to instill a high regard for growing as individuals who serve others before themselves.
Program Highlights: We provide a variety of meaningful learning experiences that foster each child’s character and academic development. These opportunities lead students along their educational journey.
• 1:1 iPads: Every student in third grade is provided a school-owned iPad that will support and enhance classroom lessons. This tool will allow the students the opportunity for further interactive collaboration, exploratory learning, and provide a medium for more extensive research of curriculum topics.
• Business Expo: Each spring, our third graders begin a study of economics. They learn about the importance of economic stability in our world, and they explore the skills required to be a successful entrepreneur. The culmination of this unit ends with your child becoming his or her own business owner. They submit a business proposal that requires them to think through the good or service they will provide, their intended audience, their prospected costs, their prices, and how they will advertise. Once their proposals are approved, they receive a “business license.” The students’ businesses come to life in May when they sell their good or service to the other grade levels in the school on Business Expo day.
• Performing Arts: Our third grade classes will perform as instrumentalists and singers using the Orff instruments.
• Philanthropy Focus: Our third graders partner with Second Harvest Food Bank to donate a portion of the proceeds from their businesses during Business Expo to this philanthropy. The students choose how much of their profit to donate and they attend a field trip the week after Business Expo to tour the Second Harvest facility and deliver their donation. It is an incredibly special day for all involved.
• Poetry Café: Students will explore and analyze the works of famous poets and the qualities of these works that made them so impressive. They will learn about the different types of figurative language and the mood and tone of poems that help convey meaning. Your child will then become the poet and create their own original masterpiece. These pieces will be shared at an evening poetry café where each child will read their poems in front of an audience of loved ones. During this unit, we collaborate with the Lower School Art Department where students will create a visual art piece that represents their poetic work to also be shared that evening.
Academic Highlights
Literacy:
• Instilling self-awareness of accurate reading rate, fluency, and expression that support comprehension
• Applying a range of reading strategies when drawing meaning from a text
• Utilizing a variety of literary genres to expose students to complex text structures and content
Math:
• Acquiring independence in developing flexible strategies to ensure mastery of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division computation
• Solving multi-step word problems using multiple mathematic strategies and operations
• Making sense of measurement quantities, conversions, and their relationships
• Demonstrating accurate spelling patterns
• Differentiating spelling instruction
• Writing narrative, expository, and opinion texts to examine a topic and convey ideas/information clearly
• Conveying mastery of grammatical conventions in writing
• Comprehending and applying geometric attributes
• Collecting and analyzing data to determine the appropriate graph to create
• Building procedural knowledge with deep understanding of numerical concepts through exposure to pictorial, concrete, and algebraic representations
Science: Social Studies:
• Investigating and studying life science, earth science, and physical science
• Participating in inquiry studies involving the scientific method
• Engaging in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) projects
2023-24
• Understanding the geographical formation of the United States, Tennessee, and its history
• Exploring the role of the U.S. government, its citizens and how diverse cultures impact the composition of our country
• Learning about the economic structure of businesses and how that impacts our community and world