Third grade is an exciting year at Milton School! Our third-grade reading units allow children to immerse themselves in within-reach fiction books while working on word solving, vocabulary development, visualizing, and prediction. Our students learn essential skills for reading expository nonfiction, such as ascertaining main ideas, recognizing text structure, comparing texts, and thinking critically, as well as the skills for reading narrative nonfiction, such as determining importance by using knowledge of story structure. Third graders closely observe characters, make predictions, and sharpen their skills in interpretation. When writing, students work with personal narrative while engaging more fully in the complete writing process, with increasing emphasis on drafting and revising their work. Our students synthesize a wide variety of information and learn to section their topics into subtopics.

Third-graders use their newfound abilities to gather and organize information to persuade people about causes the children believe matter. The math curriculum's areas include real-life investigations and problem-solving strategies. Our students encounter problems that challenge and engage them while providing investigations they can carry out. Third-grade students will develop an understanding of multiplication and division and strategies for multiplication and division within 100, fractions, the structure of rectangular arrays and of area, and two-dimensional shapes. After studying communities around the world in social studies, our students understand that world communities have similarities and differences, are affected by geography, have social, economic, political, and cultural systems, and change and develop. Our topics include the United States, Japan, and Brazil. Our Science 21 curriculum advances the student's understanding of science through the mastery of the Disciplinary Core Ideas, Science and Engineering Practices, and the Crosscutting Concepts. We foster the development of problem-solving and scientific thinking. Our units on Forces and Interactions, Interdependent Relationships in Ecosystems, Weather and Climate, and Inheritance and the Variation of Traits emphasize hands-on student-centered activities with a sound balance between process and content. Our third-grade curriculum utilizes an interdisciplinary approach to literacy, math, social studies, science, the arts, and technology.