The Ellington curriculum develops children's knowledge and skills physically, socially, emotionally, and intellectually, while helping children to become independent learners.

Each child is viewed as a unique person with an individual pattern and pace of growth. Different levels of ability, development, and learning styles are expected, accepted, and used to design curriculum and instruction.

Curriculum areas are frequently combined to show relationships among different subjects. For example, language arts and math activities are combined with science and social studies as students find solutions to a challenging problem.

Language Arts

Reading

Goal: Continue to develop students' reading strategies.

Approach: Houghton Mifflin Literature Experience program (1991) is used. The program incorporates reading, writing, listening, and speaking skills and presents a variety of quality literature experiences. Students may engage in independent reading of self-selected books, buddy reading, group reading, and cross-age reading. They may also work on projects and do reports related to the themes.

Themes: May include Family Album (realistic fiction), Once Upon a Time (fairy tales), It's Magic (non-fiction), Signs of Friendship (realistic fiction), Beware! Trouble Ahead (fantasy), Beverly Cleary (author), Mysteries of the Deep (non-fiction), What's Cooking.

Skills: Comprehension strategies include previewing and predicting, inferential thinking, identifying main ideas and details, cause and effect relationships, and character development. Students also learn the skills necessary to be proficient readers of non-fiction materials.

Writing

Goal: Communicate effectively through writing in various forms and for various purposes, focusing on the narrative form. The children are also exposed to expository (i.e. reports, directions), and persuasive forms and demand writing prompts. The children will also experience system-wide writing prompts.

Approach: Students develop a piece of writing through the process of prewriting, drafting, revising, editing, and publishing.

Skills: Developing introductions, topic sentences, paragraphs, and conclusions; elaborating, organizing, capitalization, punctuation, parts of speech, and sentence structure.

Spelling

The students use a structured spelling approach that focuses on a core group of words that is to be mastered and applied.

Handwriting

Students learn both upper and lower case letters in cursive writing, and practice short writing assignments in cursive.

The Zaner-Bloser handwriting program is used.

Mathematics

Goal: Be competent mathematical problem solvers who compute, learn to communicate, and reason mathematically using basic math skills.

Approach: Students move through a developmental process when learning math concepts. Starting with manipulatives and pictures in the early grades, they become increasingly able to use mathematical symbols and solve problems abstractly in the upper grades.

Skills: Comparing and ordering numbers through the hundreds, estimating and rounding numbers through the tens, understanding place values through the thousands, identifying, drawing, and writing fractions through fourths, beginning to learn basic facts in multiplication and division, adding and subtracting with trading, graphing, identifying and making patterns, geometry, measurement, money concepts and time. The Trailblazers mathematics program is used.

Social Studies

Goal: Promote student knowledge of communities, past and present.

Approach: Hands-on activities, projects, readings, field trips, non-fiction readings, and role-playing.

Units: Ellington Past and Present, Native Americans in Connecticut, Local Lifestyles compared and contrasted with those of Japan.

Skills: Gathering and organizing information, study skills (i.e. note taking, and summarizing), map reading and making, naming and locating continents, oceans, poles, and equator, analyzing and applying new information.

Science/Health

Goal: Promote discovery learning and scientific reasoning skills.

Approach: Experiments, hands-on projects, technology and media, non-fiction readings, and independent research.

Units: Five senses, nutrition, rocks, inside the earth, including earthquakes and volcanoes, states of matter, sink andfloat, and water environments.

Skills: Gathering, organizing, analyzing and communicating data, applying critical thinking strategies such as observing and hypothesizing.

Physical Education

The Physical Education program engages students in carefully planned and sequenced movement experiences, activities, and sports that enable them to learn about themselves and their world.

Art

This program develops an appreciation of art and life-long interest in learning more about art. Content is based on Art Appreciation, Art History, Art Criticism, and Art Creation.

Music

The program develops an appreciation for various types of music, and skills such as melody and rhythm. Students learn to play the recorder.

Technology

Use of technology is an integrated part of most areas of the curriculum.

Homework

The homework guideline for grade three is 30 minutes nightly. However, students vary in terms of the actual time it may take to complete homework. Homework assignments might include reinforcement of class lessons, study for tests, and long-term projects such as book reports, or research involving data gathering, practicing math concepts and spelling.

Testing

In third grade, students experience their first formal group tests in preparation for the Connecticut Mastery Tests in fourth grade. The tests include measures of reading, writing, and mathematics.

 Updated on 1 May 2002.