Some Thoughts on 3rd Grade

On the last day of third grade, after a week of reviewing our year, one of my students ran out of the door into the arms of his grandfather yelling, “Papa, I now know how to do everything!” Although the Waldorf third grade curriculum still alternates between math and language arts blocks, these subjects expand to encompass a myriad of ways to use these skills. The students work with money, tell time, begin measuring (often through cooking), create calendars, read chapter books, write compositions that are increasingly enriched with adjectives and adverbs, garden, crochet and learn about fibers, etc. Each learning activity is meant to connect the Third Grade students in a very concrete way to the world around them. In a sense, the world is "demystified" with a growing knowledge of the "how-to’s" of life – a perfect antidote to the challenges of the “nine-year-change” that many of the students will begin to experience this Third Grade year.

Third grade teachers will find themselves spending many hours after school in their classroom preparing for the plethora of activities that come out of the curriculum. If ever there was a “doing” year, this is it!