USOE Fine Arts Education
ServicesSecondary Resources

Third Grade Core Curriculum Resources

Study in the arts is an essential means---not an end---to acquiring thinking skills, creativity, the ability to change, and the facility to teach oneself. In a safe, nurturing environment, the arts enable students to express their feelings, communicate thoughts, explore their creativity, solve problems, communicate ideas, develop a sense of community, and appreciate themselves as participants in history, tradition, and culture. Learning in art, dance, drama, film, and music advances and strengthens motor skills, promotes considerate behavior, ability to work well with others, self discipline, perception, and sensitivity. Fine Arts experiences contribute to the developmental process of understanding one another and naturally motivate students in all their learning.

The Fine Arts Elementary Core Curriculum incorporates four art forms: Dance, Music, Theatre, and Visual Arts.

 

Dance - Third Grade

Children have a natural instinct to move - to jump or leap for joy, roll with laughter, melt with disappointment, or contract with fear. Movement helps them master their world and determine who they are. Their intuitive responses and explorations of movement become the material of the elementary dance core curriculum. Through this curriculum, students transform everyday movement into dance by focusing on the sensory experience. They learn to value themselves and others as unique individuals with the ability to move, create, and respond to ideas, concepts, feelings, and relationships through dance. Children discover that, as unique and creative human beings, the power to find joy and personal connections resides within themselves.

Below are the suggested target understandings and skills for third grade dance:

  • Moving - Show a sequence of axial movements. Demonstrate unusual combinations of locomotor movements. Create locomotor combinations that move in several directions. Create with a partner, a repeatable locomotor pattern through space using spatial relationships.

  • Investigating - Explore the dynamics of breathe rhythms. Move to various notes values. Create an interesting series of shapes on different levels, held varying lengths with axial transitions between them. Explore mirroring, shadowing and flocking movements. Show collapse explode and suspended energy qualities.

  • Creating - Explore a sequence based on an activity with a non-metric rhythm. Reorganize a sequence of locomotor steps using quarter and eighth notes. Create a short sequence of unison movement with two partners based on mirroring, shadowing or flocking. Use dance vocabulary to talk about movement solutions.

  • Connecting - Watch a live performance or video of ritual and/or folk dance. Discuss the differences in these dance forms and the reasons they were created. Create an original folk dance based on ideas or events within the community. Create an original ritual or ceremonial dance based on planting, harvesting or the cycles of the seasons.

Music - Third Grade

Music is the natural extension of the human heartbeat. Emotions are brought to the surface and melted together with thought by its imaginative rhythms and patterns of sound. It makes work and play more enjoyable and provides a way for children to relate to and express their feelings about the events of the day, their friends and family, differences in people, and the mechanical and natural wonders of the world about them. Singing, playing, exploring, creating, and listening to music will help them to recognize and describe its elements, discover its messages, increase their perception of sound, and invent their own musical expressions. They will also gain skills in working together, solving problems, thinking analytically and connecting with other subjects they are learning.

Below are the suggested target understandings and skills for third grade music:

  • Singing - Variety of songs including multicultural Melodic ostinators, partner songs, rounds.

  • Playing - Patterns in ensemble playing (linear) Layered rhythmic patterns (vertical).

  • Creating - Play rhythm patterns of the students’ creation; e.g., working with 4beat patterns have each student create their own rhythm pattern; group four different patterns into a sequence; play the sequence using body percussion or unpitched percussion instruments; repeat the sequence; change the sequence. Sing simple vocal ostinati to harmonically accompany a folk or traditional song; e.g., have students select a simple familiar song and create their own ostinato (guided creations, melody & lyrics) to harmonically accompany the song.

  • Listening - Respond to simple compositional forms (AB, ABA, ABACADA). Respond to the occurrence of chord changes. Identify specific instrumental tone colors. Expression of music mood changes.

  • Connecting - Share a favorite Native American or Hispanic song or singing game with your class. If you don’t know one, see if you can find someone in your neighborhood to teach one to you to share. Share a favorite jump rope chant, hand jive chant, or other favorite play ground rhyme with your class. Tell your class which instrument you would most like to learn to play (or already play) and how you would go about learning to play that instrument. Describe a trip you might take with your family where you could go and learn a new song or a new dance to bring home and share with your class.

Theatre - Third Grade

The Drama Core builds a bridge between play and learning. In the years before kindergarten, when blankets thrown over tables became dangerous caves and parents' old clothes grew into brave, new explorers, playing at drama taught us about being human. Beginning with kindergarten, the drama core helps us learn how to work together when we are people in a place with a problem to solve. Walking in the shoes of others helps us understand others and participate successfully in the making of a neighborhood - be it of people next door or people around the world.

Below are the suggested target understandings and skills for third grade theatre:

  • Analyzing - Discuss any complications appearing after the main conflict is established. Discuss the terms protagonist and antagonist as used in a story or play.

  • Practicing - Practice sensory recall for all five senses. Practice planning and performing dialogue scenes between at least two characters.

  • Constructing - Create improvised scenes where sensory recall is important. Create several complications to add to an existing dramatization.

  • Applying - Keep a sensory journal – 5 senses. Discuss many cultures and historical periods versus daily life.

Visual Arts - Third Grade

The Visual Arts discipline students to take greater meaning and a refined sense of beauty from the world that surrounds them. The Visual Arts give them practice in decoding the worlds of the past as well as a deeper understanding of and ability to cope with our visual culture with its nonstop parade of images and enticements. The Visual Arts give students time to interpret their own lives and to create objects that carry meaning important to them individually as well as to their generation. It gives them a means to analyze and plan.

Below are the suggested target understandings and skills for third grade visual arts:

  • Making Art and Expressing Meaning in Art - Create cast shadows that fall opposite the source of light. Sculpt an object so all of its sides create a good view. Create symbols to represent students or their interests Use size relationships to show depth.

  • Appreciating and Decoding Meaning in Art - Cover the surface of the paper from edge to edge to make a complete scene. Create art using complimentary colors. Discuss why and how artists used emphasis.