The Osborn Elementary School staff welcomes your child to Third Grade! Our third grade classrooms promote a climate of trust, love, mutual respect, and responsibility. We foster a love of learning, and encourage students to take risks and feel comfortable in their school environment. Students become increasingly more responsible and independent, academically and socially.  Although children at this time are exploring their new-found independence, they still often need reassurance and guidance to encourage their thirst for learning! In Third Grade, we strive to make teaching methods authentic as it allows students the opportunity to learn in diverse ways.  Students are accepted for their individual strengths, and are offered the opportunity to collaborate and respect other learning styles.  Everyone can be an expert in third grade!  

Language Arts

Third grade is the year when students begin reading to learn, rather than learning to read. Using a workshop model, students start to slow down and read “deeper” and ask thought-provoking questions through a variety of genres.  In writing, students will learn and grow as writers with a workshop model.  Third graders produce narrative, informational, explanatory, and persuasive writing pieces.  

Math

Our math curriculum follows a concrete-pictorial-abstract approach. In the concrete stage, students use hands-on manipulatives to explore new concepts. From there, students move to the pictorial stage to see these ideas represented by diagrams and discover how models help demonstrate the relationships between numbers. Finally, students connect their concrete experiences and pictorial representations to abstract symbols, such as numbers. Through hands-on learning, visualization, and pictorial representations, students’ understanding, confidence, and love of math grows. Third grade math topics include place value up to 10,000, addition, subtraction, multiplication, fractions, measurement, graphs, area and perimeter.

Science

Our science curriculum is inquiry-based and encourages hands-on experimentation. Third grade students are given opportunities to observe, question, and record their findings about concepts such as forces and motion, ecosystems, weather/climate, and inherited traits. Students are given additional learning experiences through cultural enrichment opportunities.  

Social Studies

A major theme in third-grade social studies is learning about the interdependence of certain world communities, including the United States, Japan and Brazil. Students will become familiar with cultural and physical geography, and how they affect life on our planet.