Grade 3 - Language Arts

• Conduct research projects that build knowledge about a topic 
• Gather information from reliable print and digital sources; take brief notes on sources and sort evidence into categories 
• Consult reference materials, including dictionaries and thesauruses as needed to check and correct spellings
• Utilize multiple reliable sources
• Cite  resources
• Create presentation from research findings
• Present research findings in creative, engaging ways, including digital tools

• Set goals and reading resolutions
• Read with sufficient accuracy and fluency to support comprehension. 
• Read on-level text with purpose and understanding. 
• Read on-level prose and poetry orally with accuracy, appropriate rate, and expression on successive readings 
• Use context to confirm or self-correct word recognition and understanding, rereading as necessary. 
• Summarize reading parts of books aloud, and be able to explain what makes a book special
• Recognize when they are having trouble comprehending and strategize to enhance their understanding (including note-taking, rereading, visualizing)
• Take notes and annotate by underlining when reading
• Make predictions during reading
• Support predictions by recognizing and noting small details from a story
• Summarize as they are reading to themselves and to others
• Trade ideas with reading partners, including listening to each other and asking questions
• Solve unknown words by reading forward to pick up contextual clues
• Make text-to-self connections
• Make text-to-text or text-to-media connections
• Make text-to-world connections
• Gather information from their texts to understand the author’s purpose
• Learn to pay special attention to text features – titles, subtitles, charts, graphs, pictures, captions, glossary, table of contents
• Learn to pause to make little summaries to enhance understanding and categorization of details  
• Organize bits of information in a nonfiction text into categories
• Practice: THINK, TALK and JOT
• Recall and utilize prior knowledge to build expectations and predictions about texts
• Read through multiple lenses 
• Notice characterization--how a character speaks, acts, dresses, etc.
• Notice patterns in a text
• Create theories about texts and characters to develop deeper level thinking
• Identify primary vs. secondary characters
• Identify the evolution of a story: exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, resolution
• Make comparisons between texts, stories, and characters
• Understand theme 
• Understand Cause and Effect relationships
• Understand how a story or biography provides a window into the time and setting in which the subject or characters lived 

• Ask and answer questions to demonstrate understanding of a text, referring explicitly to the text as the basis for the answers. 
• Recount stories, including fables, folktales, and myths from diverse cultures; determine the central message, lesson, or moral and explain how it is conveyed through key details in the text. 
• Describe characters in a story (e.g., their traits, motivations, or feelings) and explain how their actions contribute to the sequence of events. 
• Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text, distinguishing literal from nonliteral language.
• Distinguish their own point of view from that of the narrator or those of the characters. 
• Explain how specific aspects of a text’s illustrations contribute to what is conveyed by the words in a story (e.g., create mood, emphasize aspects of a character or setting) 
• Compare and contrast the themes, settings, and plots of stories written by the same author about the same or similar characters (e.g., in books from a series). 
• By the end of the year, read and comprehend literature, including stories, dramas, and poetry, at the high end of the grades 2–3 text complexity band independently and proficiently. 
• For Informational Units:
• Ask and answer questions to demonstrate understanding of a text, referring explicitly to the text as the basis for the answers. 
• Determine the main idea of a text; recount the key details and explain how they support the main idea. 
• Describe the relationship between a series of historical events, scientific ideas or concepts, or steps in technical procedures in a text, using language that pertains to time, sequence, and cause/effect. 
• Determine the meaning of general academic and domain-specific words and phrases in a text relevant to a grade 3 topic or subject area 
• Use text features and search tools (e.g., key words, sidebars, hyperlinks) to locate information relevant to a given topic proficiently. 
• Use information gained from illustrations (e.g., maps, photographs) and the words in a text to demonstrate an understanding of the text (e.g., where, when, why, and how key events occur). 
• Describe the logical connection between particular sentences and paragraphs in a text (e.g., comparison, cause/effect, first/second/ third in a sequence). 
• Compare and contrast the most important points and key details presented in two texts on the same topic. 
• By the end of the year, read and comprehend informational texts, including history/social studies, science, and technical texts, at the high end of the grades 2–3 text complexity band independently and proficiently.

Through the Writers Workshop Model, students will study multiple units including personal narratives-small moments, Expert topic, Research-Informational, Persuasive Speech-Opinion Essay,  and Research-Biography. To model these genres of writing, students will read and explore Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, The Life Cycle of an Emperor Penguin by Bobbie Kalman, Gorillas by Lori McManus, Fireflies by Julie Brinckloe, Last Stop on Market Street by Matt De La Pena, and Come On, Rain! by Karen Hesse.

Through these texts, students will:

• Write opinion pieces on topics or texts, supporting a point of view with reasons 
• Introduce the topic or text they are writing about, state an opinion, and create an organizational structure that lists reasons. 
• Provide reasons that support the opinion. 
• Use linking words and phrases (e.g., because, therefore, since, for example) to connect opinion and reasons. 
• Provide a concluding statement or section. 
• Write informative/explanatory texts to examine a topic and convey ideas and information clearly. 
• Introduce a topic and group related information together; include illustrations when useful to aiding comprehension. 
• Develop the topic with facts, definitions, and details. 
• Use linking words and phrases (e.g., also, another, and, more, but) to connect ideas within categories of information. 
• Provide a concluding statement or section. 
• Write narratives to develop real or imagined experiences or events using effective technique, descriptive details, and clear event sequences. 
• Establish a situation and introduce a narrator and/or characters; organize an event sequence that unfolds naturally. 
• Use dialogue and descriptions of actions, thoughts, and feelings to develop experiences and events or show the responses of characters to situations. 
• Use temporal words and phrases to signal event order. 
• Provide a sense of closure in their written work. 
• Produce writing in which the development and organization are appropriate to task and purpose (with support as needed)
• Develop and strengthen writing by planning, revising, and editing 
• Use technology to produce and publish writing 
• Write routinely over extended time frames (time for research, reflection, and revision) and shorter time frames (a single sitting or a day or two) for a range of discipline-specific tasks, purposes, and audiences.

• Form and use the simple (e.g., I walked; I walk; I will walk) verb tenses.
• Ensure subject-verb and pronoun-antecedent agreement.
• Use coordinating and subordinating conjunctions.
• Produce simple, compound, and complex sentences.
• Demonstrate command of the conventions of standard English capitalization, punctuation, and spelling when writing.
• Capitalize appropriate words in titles
• Use quotation marks in dialogue.
• Form and use possessives accurately
• Use conventional spelling for high-frequency and other studied words and for adding suffixes to base words (e.g., sitting, smiled, cries, happiness).
• Use spelling patterns and generalizations (e.g., word families, position-based spellings, syllable patterns, ending rules, meaningful word parts) in writing words.
• Acquire and use accurately grade-appropriate conversational, general academic, and domain-specific words and phrases, including those that signal spatial and temporal relationships (e.g., After dinner that night we went looking for them).

• Vocabulary is most often learned in context from the texts that are read as a class.  3rd grade students also utilize a structured vocabulary book to enhance the thematic words they access through their reading. The 3rd grade students will be able to:
• Determine or clarify the meaning of unknown and multiple-meaning words and phrases based on grade 3 reading and content, choosing flexibly from a range of strategies.
• Determine the meaning of the new word formed when a known affix is added to a known word (e.g., agreeable/disagreeable, comfortable/uncomfortable, care/careless, heat/preheat).
• Use a known root word as a clue to the meaning of an unknown word with the same root 
• Understand compound words by breaking them into parts the student understands 
• Use glossaries and beginning dictionaries, both print and digital, to determine or clarify the meaning of words and phrases.
• Demonstrate understanding of figurative language, word relationships and nuances in word meanings.
• Distinguish the literal and nonliteral meanings of words and phrases in context (e.g., take steps).
• Distinguish shades of meaning among related words that describe states of mind or degrees of certainty (e.g., knew, believed, suspected, heard, wondered)
• Acquire and use accurately grade-appropriate conversational, general academic, and domain-specific words and phrases, including those that signal spatial and temporal relationships (e.g., After dinner that night we went looking for them).

• Throughout 3nd grade students continue giving oral presentations in front of multiple audiences.  Throughout the year, the students have an opportunity to present to the whole school as well as their classmates , mentors, and parents as they do oral and audio/visual presentation to demonstrate their understandings. The bottle project is the culminating presentation in which all students have chosen to study a historical figure who is meaningful to them, create a visual aid, and then provide a first-person account of their persona’s life, challenges, and accomplishments. 
• Choose words and phrases for effect
• Recognize and observe differences between the conventions of spoken and written standard English
• Ask questions to check understanding of information presented, stay on topic, and link their comments to the remarks of others.
• Determine the main ideas and supporting details of a text read aloud or information presented in diverse media and formats, including visually, quantitatively, and orally.
• Ask and answer questions about information from a speaker, offering appropriate elaboration and detail.
• Report on a topic or text, tell a story, or recount an experience with appropriate facts and relevant, descriptive details, speaking clearly at an understandable pace.
• Create engaging oral or audio/visual presentation that demonstrate understanding and fluid reading at an understandable pace