Unit 4 is typically a four-week unit taught in February.
Mathematics is a language of carefully defined terms and symbols. In this unit, students extend and refine their knowledge of mathematical language as they investigate geometry concepts.
In the first part of the unit, students explore and describe two-dimensional figures. As knowledge of geometry vocabulary and concepts grows through the elementary years, students develop more sophisticated ways of classifying figures. In second grade, students classified figures as circles, triangles, squares, and rectangles. In third grade, students use terms such as polygons, right angles, pentagons, and octagons to classify figures. In fourth grade, students will investigate how the relationships of line segments in a polygon can be used to classify figures as parallelograms and trapezoids. In addition to classifying two-dimensional figures, instruction focuses on how tools can be used to draw figures with symmetry or congruence and how language can be used to describe these concepts. The idea that changing the position of an object does not affect its attributes also is investigated in third grade as students describe and represent slides, flips, and turns of two-dimensional figures.
In the second part of the unit, students analyze and classify three-dimensional figures. In second grade, students identified the number of faces and vertices of various solids. In third grade, the instructional emphasis is on relating three-dimensional figures to their two-dimensional counterparts.
Parent Newsletters for Grade 3
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Content map for Grade 3 Unit 4 (PDF)
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