3rd Grade English Language Arts: Complete Curriculum of Third Grade ELA

Third Grade English Language Arts teaches to common core standards, covering literature, foundational skills, writing, speaking and listening. Students practice reading for fluency, comprehension and vocabulary. They will learn to look for the central message, lesson or moral of the story. There is a strong focus on grammar, which includes learning parts of speech (noun, pronoun, verb, adverb, adjective), rules of capitalization, subject-verb agreement, punctuation and more. There are weekly spelling word lists for learners to practice and a Thursday spelling quiz. There are also weekly writing assignments with students practicing opinion writing, poetry, dialogue, using a dictionary and more. 

I am currently enrolled in my final course through the Gettysburg College-Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History master of arts in American history program. In addition, I have bachelor of arts degrees in English, journalism, and political science. I was the director of a social justice center for three years during which time I routinely taught about and facilitated conversations about historical and current political events for both teen and adults participants. Before that, I was a newspaper editor and reporter for 15 years. I have been teaching history, social studies, and English Language Arts classes for the past five years. I am currently lead teacher at The Foster Woods Folk School, which focuses on education, storytelling, and the arts within an ecosocial justice framework aimed at celebrating and improving our connections as a global community of human and non-human earthlings. In this role, I work with learners of all ages with a primary focus of working with learners in grades three through 12.  

There is daily homework to be completed outside of class time. Homework includes reading and writing assignments, as well as worksheets and other learning projects. 

Weekly homework is assessed as follows: 
Reading Quiz: 15 Percent
Spelling Word Project: 15 Percent
Grammar Quiz: 15 Percent
Grammar Project/Worksheet: 15 Percent
Class Participation: 15 Percent
Writing Assignment: 25 Percent

Learners earning a C (70 percent) or greater will receive a letter of completion that reflects their final grade. 

1 hour 40 minutes per week in class, and an estimated 2 - 4 hours per week outside of class.

Students will need either a paper or digital copy of E.B. White’s “Charlotte’s Web” for Unit 1. 

I will provide PDF readers for materials covered in Units 2-4. 

For the Unit 2 reader, I have adapted some of the traditional literature we will be reading to be appropriate for a third-grade audience. Sources from which traditional literature will be taken or that I have used in adaptations include: 
Aesop’s Fables-The Library of Congress
“The Pot of Wisdom: Ananse stories” by Adwoa Badoe
“A Listening Wind: Native Literature from the Southeast” edited by Marcia Haag
“Sky Loom: Native American Myth, Story, and Song” edited by Brian Swann
“Hunters, Predators and Prey: Inuit Perceptions of Animals” by Frédéric Laugrand and Jarich Oosten
“Outlaw Heroes in Myth and History” by Graham Seal
“American Tall Tales” by Mary Pope Osborne
Grimm’s Complete Fairytales
“The Annotated Hans Christian Andersen” edited by Maria Tatar
“Greek Mythology: The Gods, Goddesses, and Heroes Handbook: From Aphrodite to Zeus, a Profile of Who's Who in Greek Mythology” by Liv Albert

Content in the Unit 4 history reader was compiled by me. Among the many sources I consulted in compiling the information are: 
The Canadian Museum of History: First Peoples of Canada
"Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West" by Ned Blackhawk 
"The Greater Chaco Landscape: Ancestors, Scholarship, and Advocacy" edited by Ruth M. Van Dyke and Carrie C. Heitman
The National Park Service, Mesa Verde National Park 
Crow Canyon Archaeological Center
"Haudenosaunee Guide for Educators," by The National Museum of the American Indian, Education Office
"Ancestral Pueblos Curriculum" by Heard Museum 
“A People’s History of the United States” by Howard Zinn
“American History Now” by Eric Foner and Lisa McGirr

Content in the Unit 4 social studies reader was compiled by me. Among the many sources I consulted in compiling the information are: 
National Geographic
World Atlas
The Nile Basin Initiative
The International Commission for the Protection of the Danube River
The Amazon Conservation Alliance
The Yangtze River Protection Law, The National People's Congress of the People's Republic of China

Reading assignments for the news article and biography sections will be drawn from NewsELA articles.