- Highland Lakes School
- Writing Curriculum
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Curriculum Overview
Curriculum in all of the third grade classrooms follows the Common Core
(Arizona College and Career Readiness) Standards.Writing
Next to reading, writing should be the most exciting skill to improve on this year. Students will build their basic writing and spelling skills through mini lessons and activities to become more effective writers. There are many aspects of writing that we will focus on this year.
The first is the writing process itself. The students will have an ongoing writing folder which holds the assignments they will be working on each day to improve familiarity with the writing process. The focus for the writing process includes:
Prewriting Editing Writing
Publishing Revising
Another focus in writing is grammar. Students will understand how to recognize and form a complete sentence with subject and predicate, follow basic capitalization rules, proofreading strategies, and other grammar terms like:
Subject/verb agreement Prepositional phrase
PunctuationAn additional focus in writing is spelling. Words Their Way will be used to meet each student's spelling needs. Students will practice their spelling words through word sorts. There will be a variety of activities for student to practice with at school and home. Words Their Way focuses on spelling phonemic patterns and spelling rules, such as:vowel patterns dropping the final ‘e’
changing final ‘y’ to ‘i’ doubling final consonantsyllables prefixes and suffixesThe students should learn the spelling pattern and apply their knowledge to other words following this same pattern. This will be a little different than memorizing a spelling list. Into Reading will teach children to spell words that may not necessarily be on their practice list.
One more focus in writing is working to include the six recognized traits to a well written piece. These are:Ideas Word Choice Organization
Sentence Fluency Voice ConventionsLastly, there are many different types of writing. In third grade, we will be working on some or all of these genres:
Argumentative/persuasive Narrative
Informative/explanatory texts Comparison/Contrast
Cause/effect Description