What’s new in common core: Grade 3

Two local educators made a presentation Tuesday to the Riverhead Central School District Board of Education outlining the shifts in third grade education being made in the implementation of the state’s new common core curriculum.

Vanessa Williams, a literacy coach at Aquebogue Elementary School, told the board there are six main shifts in the teaching of English Language Arts, placing emphasis on: balancing literacy and informational texts, building knowledge in the disciplines, a staircase of text complexity, text-based answers, writing from sources and building academic vocabulary.

“Students are reading a wide range of stories and describing how a story teaches a lesson, describing characters in a story and how their actions contributed to events, reading texts about history, social studies or science and answering questions about what they learned based on the text itself, not prior knowledge – that’s a really big emphasis with common core – referring to information from illustrations, such as maps or pictures as well as the words in a text, learning the rules of spoken and written English…and students are participating in class discussions,” Williams said.

She described a “scaffolded reading skills” design that focuses on getting students to refer directly to texts in Grade 3, building toward citing explicit examples from texts in Grade 4. The curriculum builds on text-based lessons taught in Grade 2.

Last month, the board heard what shifts were being made as the common core initiative is implemented in grades K-2.

Williams said the new curriculum establishes a common language used continuously as students advance in grades.

Board president Ann Cotten-DeGrasse asked how grammar is being taught. Williams said K-4 students learn grammar in a variety of ways that are integrated into other lessons, “through interactive read-aloud, you also have it taught directly during writing workshop instruction.” She said grammar is not taught in isolation and is graded based on rubrics for narrative, information and opinion writing.

A major component of the curriculum is asking students to support their thinking with evidence from the text, Williams said, saying that her favorite question for students is, “What in the text made you think that?”

Aquebogue principal Phil Kent explained the shifts in math curriculum. He said students are learning to understand the number 100 as a bundle of 10 groups of 10, multiplying single-digit numbers from memory and by multiples of 10.

Kent described a cohesive, vertical approach to teaching math that strengthens the previous year’s lessons rather than jumping to the next level.

Cotten-DeGrasse said the Common Core “really isn’t anything we haven’t done,” just perhaps not in depth.

“I can see that a lot of it is designed to get a kid thinking, and in order to do that you have to learn to ask questions not in a closed-ended way but in an open-ended way, to make them think. Are we doing that well in that area?” She asked.

Williams said faculty is working with a staff developer in each building, and techniques are being taught in Teachers College.

The presentation was lightly attended and ended with no questions from the audience, in contrast to the K-2 presentation in October, when several residents aired concerns over the curriculums speed of implementation, flexibility and demands on children.