Teaching Guide

Teaching 3rd Grade Science

Magnets: how do they work?

Quick question: are you an alien?

If you answered yes, this is the perfect course for you to learn everything you've ever wanted to know about life on human-inhabited Earth, including forces that affect motion, interactions between living and non-living things, and the different environments that make up the planet.

If you answered no, you still get to learn about all that—and you're officially a human. Congrats.

Our point is, Shmoop's 3rd Grade Science curriculum will give you and your students the skills to understand and analyze the world around you. We've created a Next Generation Science Standards-aligned curriculum that's chock full of physical science, life science, and earth science—with just enough dinosaur trivia to keep it edgy. Each lesson in our themed units features Warm Ups, Direct Instruction, and Guided and Independent Practice, along with worksheets, assessments, answer keys, and videos.

Aside from the explicit instruction (yup, an engaging script), you can also expect hands-on activities and experiments that will get your students one step closer to becoming mad scientists science superstars. Here are just some of the awesome projects your students will complete:

  • Build mobiles to demonstrate center of gravity principles
  • Plan and design an invention that uses magnetism to solve a problem
  • Create terrariums to observe live worms and other creepy crawlies

By the end of the course, students will be able to form hypotheses, make observations, investigate and experiment, analyze quantitative data, explain heritable traits, identify stages of a life cycle, analyze climate, and think critically about the natural world and humans' place in it. And in a special two-for-one deal, they'll also apply what they've learned in ELA courses through close reading of informative texts, scientific articles, and narrative, science-packed fiction.

The only thing that's not included? A handy toolkit of supplies and weapons to survive the extraterrestrial takeover.

What's in Shmoop's Elementary Curriculum?

These are year-long elementary courses with 90-day-long semesters, made up of themed, standards-aligned units. You can follow the course verbatim in its day-by-day progression, or cherry-pick specific lessons by previewing the curriculum maps and seeing which standards, skills, or texts you'd most like to teach. Courses also include teacher scripts, differentiation and extension, videos, worksheets, and answer keys.

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