Third grade is an exciting age of becoming a more independent student. Students continue to grow spiritually by learning more about God's grace, mercy, and love by focusing on the key concepts of Law and Gospel, confession, repentance, and forgiveness. Memory work is given to assist in grasping these concepts with a heavy concentration upon the Ten Commandments. Students continue to develop and cultivate their reading skills, especially vocabulary and comprehension. Specific strategies include retelling, identifying the main idea, questioning, reading for specific detail, etc. Students will learn to listen to and retell stories through reading and are encouraged to form ideas, opinions, and feelings about specific pieces of writing.
Within the structure of Writers Workshop, students learn to build habits and develop strategies that proficient writers used on a daily basis. Students learn about writing techniques that are common to narrative, informative, and opinion writing. They further develop and strengthen their writing by cycling through the process of planning, revising, editing, and publicly sharing their opinions with a real audience. Third grade math has a heavy emphasis upon multiplication, division, fractions, area, perimeter, and graphing. Our inquiry-based Battle Creek Science Curriculum focuses upon motion, light and sound, the Earth's natural resources, and an organism's growth and survival. Third grade social studies is primarily devoted to learning about Michigan's geography, government, economics, and history.
