Summer Learning: Bridging the Gap to 3rd Grade Math

Is your child heading into 3rd grade this fall? This summer course is designed to close the gap between where they are and where they need to be — building rock-solid math skills before the new school year starts. Students will sharpen their addition and subtraction with regrouping, get a confident introduction to multiplication and division, explore 3D shapes, and learn how to tackle word problems step by step. Across four sessions, learners don't just review — they deepen their understanding of why math works, not just how to do it. Send your child into 3rd grade ready, confident, and ahead of the curve.

Built for the Bridge Between 2nd and 3rd Grade

The jump into 3rd grade math is one of the biggest leaps in early elementary school — multiplication, division, and more complex problem-solving all show up fast. This four-session summer course gives students a running start by reinforcing the skills they already have and introducing the concepts that are coming. Every lesson is designed to build real understanding, not just surface familiarity, so students walk into fall feeling prepared and confident.

Addition, Subtraction, and the Power of Place Value

Students revisit two-digit and multi-digit addition and subtraction with a focus on why regrouping works — not just the steps, but the logic behind carrying and borrowing across place values. This conceptual grounding doesn't just help with 3rd grade; it lays the groundwork for decimal operations in later grades. Students practice applying these skills in both straightforward calculations and real-world word problem contexts.

Multiplication and Division — Introduced the Right Way

Rather than jumping straight to memorization, this course builds multiplication understanding from the ground up. Students explore multiplication as repeated addition, visualize it through arrays and number lines, and connect it to everyday situations. From there, they discover how multiplication and division are inverse operations — and how knowing one set of facts unlocks the other. Strategies like equal sharing and grouping make division intuitive before it becomes procedural.

3D Shapes and Spatial Reasoning

Students identify and compare 3D shapes — cubes, cones, spheres, prisms, and pyramids — and learn to count and describe their faces, edges, and vertices. By connecting these shapes to real-world objects, students sharpen their spatial reasoning in a way that supports geometry work throughout elementary and middle school.

Cracking the Code on Word Problems

Word problems trip up a lot of students — not because the math is too hard, but because reading and interpreting the question is its own skill. This course dedicates real time to teaching students how to identify keywords, figure out what operation is needed, break problems into manageable steps, and represent problems visually with diagrams or models. These strategies apply across every math topic and every grade level.

What Students Walk Away With

By the end of this course, students will have a confident command of regrouping, a solid introduction to multiplication and division, the ability to reason about 3D shapes, and a repeatable strategy for approaching word problems. Most importantly, they'll understand that math makes sense — and that they can figure it out. That mindset is the best thing any student can bring into a new school year.