Third Grade

Third grade is a crucial year for students to discover their passions and explore their academic interests.

Children continue to build upon their solid foundations and begin more focused studies across the curriculum. At St. Michael’s, we continue to foster strong relationships through the Responsive Classroom model. Students engage in daily morning meetings that work toward building a healthy classroom community.

Reading, writing, mathematics, and thematic (social) studies are the main classroom curricular areas. The major shift for third grade students is from learning to read in the primary grades to reading to learn. Students engage in guided reading groups, book clubs, and whole class reads. Students begin focusing more on chapter books, honing their comprehension skills. Texts used include fiction and non-fiction, and students begin to rely more on reading across the disciplines.

Singapore Math Program

St. Michael’s was the first school in Rhode Island to adopt the Singapore math program. The program is structured around the belief that every new math concept should be taught first in concrete terms, then pictorial, and lastly, abstract. In third grade, students continue this model with more complex topics. Multiplication and division are the primary units of study at this grade level. Students work to understand multiplication and division as repeated addition and subtraction, using manipulatives to gain a concrete understanding. From there, they move to abstract equations and begin to memorize their facts to help build a solid foundation for the years to come. This strong base helps students to more readily understand fractions. In third grade, students primarily work with equivalent fractions.

Writer's Workshop

Writer’s workshop in third grade aims to further solidify students’ ability to see themselves as authors. Through creative writing, children engage in the writing process using graphic organizers to plan their work, then composing rough drafts, and working with the teacher to revise and edit to produce a final product. One such project students engage in is the creation of personal narratives, through which they compile a story complete with a cover page, title page, and an “about the author” page. This results in a “published” book of their very own. This project serves as preparation for the students’ fairy tale adaptations, in which students study a variety of classic fairy tales and flex their creative muscles to create unique versions of these time-honored tales. Additionally, writing becomes interwoven throughout the curriculum as students compose expository pieces in thematic studies.

Thematic Studies

Theme in third grade brings students on a geographic journey to learn about the history and culture of the United States. Beginning close to home, students study the state of Rhode Island and the rich history of Newport. While engaging in research through texts and internet sources, the students also dive into experiential learning, taking a walking tour of the city of Newport to visit notable landmarks such as the Touro Synagogue, the Redwood Library, and Liberty Square to learn of the Newport Middle Passage’s involvement in the slave trade. In studying Rhode Island, students learn about Roger Williams, state symbols, and notable places in the Ocean State.

After learning all about their home state, students begin to study the United States, learning of the various regions, comparing and contrasting each, and then selecting a state of interest to do an independent study on. Through this project, students create “state floats” for a “parade”, during which they share with the school community all that they’ve learned. Children have ample opportunities to explore areas of interest, so much so that a group of third grade students in 2015 were puzzled that Rhode Island did not have a state insect, when other states did. Teachers allowed students to lead the charge and shifted the areas of study to researching insects that are native to Rhode Island. After much research and discussion, students wrote proposals to the State to name the American Burying Beetle (native to Block Island) as the Rhode Island state insect. They attended gatherings at the State House and the state insect was officially named!

In addition to their classroom academics, third grade students are exposed to a variety of special area classes such as Spanish, Innovation Lab, Music, Science, PE, Mindfulness, Drama, and Fine Art.