2022-23 3rd Grade Admission Brochure

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.

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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.

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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.

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Performing Arts: Our third grade classes will perform as instrumentalists and singers using the Orff instruments.

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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.

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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

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

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

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

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Science: Social Studies: • Investigating and studying life science, earth science, • Understanding the geographical formation of the and physical science United States, Tennessee, and its history • Participating in inquiry studies involving the scientific • Exploring the role of the U.S. government, its citizens method and how diverse cultures impact the composition of • Engaging in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, our country and Math) projects • Learning about the economic structure of businesses and how that impacts our community and world 2023-24

Third Grade Program Schedule

7:45 a.m.

Arrival: Students are greeted as they unpack, record their agenda for the day, and engage in a morning activity.

7:50 a.m.

Devotion: During this special time, students will have the opportunity to share prayer requests and praises. We then read together and discuss a Bible story and verse before closing with prayer time.

On Wednesdays, we attend a lower school chapel program led by various FRA staff members and individual classrooms.

8:05 a.m.

Literacy Block: Students are actively engaged in a structured literacy curriculum using a systematic multi-linguistic approach. Opportunities to develop fluency through varied strategies such as a reader’s theater and parter reading occur daily. Fourth graders learn about words’ origins, morphology, and parts of speech to grasp a better understanding of meanings and spellings of words. Teachers immerse students in rich literature and engaging nonfiction text to explicitly teach vocabulary, grammar, and comprehension strategy. Students enjoy novels from a variety of genres throughout shared reading and liuterature circles.

8:30 a.m.

Physical Education: All third grade students will participate in P.E. together for 30 minutes daily.

10:15 a.m.

Writing and Literacy Block: Written expression is the deepest level of literacy. Fourth graders are explicitly taught grammar and mechanics so they are properly equipped with the tools needed to draft, edit, write, revise, and publish their own writing pieces. Throughout the year, students engage in the entire writing process creating an expository nonfiction piece, an opinion piece, and a fiction piece.

Students respond to reading in their journals on a weekly basis, and teachers regularly collaborate and conference with fourth graders to set individualized writing goals.

10:45 a.m.

Recess: Third grade students enjoy a common recess time on the playground.

11:20 a.m.

Science/Social Studies: In science, students will study plants and animals, ecosystems, weather, matter, energy, forces in motion, and the solar system while working in conjunction with the STEM lab teacher. In social studies, they will study map and globe skills, American history, Tennessee history, national government, and economics.

12:00 p.m.

Lunch

12:35 p.m.

Math: Our lower school math block is centered on the Math in Focus curriculum. The major units of study in third grade are: place value, mental math, estimation, addition and subtraction, multiplication and division, money, time, geometry, fractions, decimals, and measurement. Our math time includes a whole-group anchor task, guided learning through the use of technology and partnership discourse, and differentiated small-group instruction.

1:45 p.m.

Enrichments: Students attend one of five enrichment classes for 45 minutes each day: STEM Lab • Guidance • Performing Arts • Visual Arts • Media Center • Spanish

2:40 p.m.

Dismissal

2023-24

4700 Franklin Pike Nashville, TN 37220 FranklinRoadAcademy.com