The third grade curriculum focuses on Pennsylvania Eligible Content as a pathway to mastery of the Common Core State Standards. The units cover the major works required in third grade.
Students understand multi-digit numbers written in base-ten notation, and recognize that the digits in each place represent amounts of thousands, hundreds, tens, or ones. Students will use their understanding of addition to develop fluency with addition and subtraction within 100. They solve problems within 1,000 by applying their understanding of models for addition and subtraction, and they develop, discuss, and use efficient, accurate, and generalizable methods to compute sums and differences of whole numbers in base-ten notation, using their understanding of place value and the properties of operations.
Second, the students are developing understanding of multiplication and division and gaining strategies for multiplication and division within 100. Students will gain understanding through activities and problems involving equal groups, arrays and area models. The understanding will develop that multiplication is finding an unknown product and division is finding a unknown factor. Students will use properties of operations to calculate products of whole numbers, using sophisticated strategies based on these to solve multiplication and division problems involving single-digit factors. Students will learn telling time to the minute and be able to estimate and measure mass and liquid volume.
Third, students will develop an understanding of fractions, especially unit fractions. Students will view fractions in general as being built out of unit fractions, and they will use fractions along with visual fraction models to represent parts of the whole. Students will understand that the size of a fractional part is relative to the size of the whole. They will solve fraction models and strategies based on noticing equal numerators or denominators.
Fourth, students will recognize area as an attribute of two-dimensional regions. They will measure the area of a shape by finding the total number of same-sized units of area required to cover the shape without gaps or overlaps, a square with sides of unit length being the standard unit for measuring area. Students will understand that rectangular arrays can be decomposed into identical rows or into identical columns.
Lastly, students will describe, analyze, and compare properties of two-dimensional shapes. They compare and classify shapes by their sides and angles, and connect these with definitions of shapes. Students will also relate their fraction work to geometry by expressing the area of part of a shape as a unit fraction of the whole.
