Inquiring my way through 3rd grade Long Range Plans...

I thought I would spend more time creating this summer, but I'm realizing it's hard to create when I am still trying to figure out what things should look like. 

We are required to turn in long range plans by next week, so I have been spending time over the last couple of weeks figuring out what things should look like. Even though the ones I turn in our pretty basic, I am still realizing that I need to think through what standards we will cover and when, AND making sure that I can mesh Reading and Writing together.

We cover 4 novels a year and teach a lot of our skills through those as frameworks for genre etc. This year my novels are Because of Winn-Dixie, The Hundred Dresses, Encyclopedia Brown, and (hopefully) Frindle. 

     

I plan on spending the first two novels digging into story basics and building comprehension skills. I am hoping to use this reading skills packet I made last year, and eventually adding some interactive notebook pages to match. Encyclopedia Brown I hope to start introducing some nonfiction skills, and Frindle will be back into comprehension and vocabulary. 

Thats the ROUGH plan! Subject to change for sure! :)

Constantly making lists of thoughts and ideas! ;)

For writing, I need to teach the 6 traits, so that is providing my framework, focusing on each trait more in depth, but using some ideas from Lucy Calkins Units of Study for third grade to do that. Basically during the first two novels we will focus on Narrative while dicussing the traits of Ideas, Voice, and Word Choice. We will move in to informational text while reading Encyclopedia Brown, and then move into persuasive writing while we read Frindle. And focusing on Organization and Sentence Fluency during the last two, with conventions throughout! 

I'm using Evan Moor's 6 Trait Writing for 3rd grade - we will do a couple lessons at school and then they will do the rest of the week at home.

I'm looking forward to trying a couple of author studies during writing as well. I am thinking Patricia Polacco (during voice and word choice) and Gail Gibbons when we start working on informational text. I only am with these kids for two mornings a week, so I am not sure how much I will accomplish, but I would love to attempt digging deep into writing with those authors! 

We will wrap up the year with a unit of fairy tales for both Writing and Reading! :)

Any third grade teachers have any great resources they like to use? Thoughts on the essentials of third grade? Please share! :)