1. Isaac School District No.5
ELAS Thematic Unit Overview Grade 3 – Unit 5
2012-2013
Unit 5: A World of Words on a Planet Called Earth and Beyond
DURATION: Six Weeks
In this unit, students read stories, poems, and informational text full of rich language.
Students read fiction that demonstrates the use of idioms and exhibits careful diction. They read poems that focus on a simple topic,
such as corn or grass, to see how the topics are developed line by line and stanza by stanza. They write to express their own opinions
about the idea of having laws that legislate what people can and cannot eat. Working with Latin suffixes, they will see the way suffixes
transform one part of speech into another. Students illustrate an idiom to express their own interpretation of its meaning, and write a
note to Amelia Bedelia about the idiom. Finally, the students research other planets.
Essential Questions: Vocabulary:
What makes a word or phrase the “right” idiom
word or phrase? Latin suffixes
thesaurus
Why do we use idioms? word roots
Essential Learning:
English incorporates words and phrases
from other languages around the world.
Students understand the connection
between words and their meanings,
Distributed Resources Aligned to Unit 5:
Amelia Bedelia Series (Parrish) Dog Breath! The Horrible Trouble with Hally Tosis (Pilkey)
My Momma Likes to Say (Brennan-Nelson) In a Pickle and Other Funny Idioms (Terban & Maestro)
Mad as a Wet Hen and Other Funny Idioms (Terban & Maestro) The Planets (Gibbons)
Punching the Clock: Funny Action Idioms (Terban & Huffman) Frindle (Clements and Selznick)
It’s Disgusting and We Ate It! True Food Facts From Around the World (Solheim & Brace)
Underlined vocabulary indicates Tier II word. 1

2. Underlined vocabulary indicates Tier II word. 2