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Third grade teachers are working to ensure that their students
continue to gain confidence in their reading,
writing and speaking skills. Students are able to make choices
from a wide variety of texts appropriate to their reading level.
They can choose from poetry, fiction, nonfiction, drama and information
from sources other than books such as magazines or online. Students
have mastered the basics of reading and are refining their skills
to improve their silent reading,
research skills, writing
technique and oral presentations. They are also able to read
and comprehend written instructions.
Students work on their word recognition and on increasing their vocabularies.
Reading at this level requires the student to recognize and use
complex word families to discover the meaning of unfamiliar multisyllabic
words. They also are expected to use the surrounding words and
sentences to decipher meanings of unknown words. They learn the
meanings of common prefixes and suffixes to help them deconstruct
and understand new words. Students are expected to use dictionaries
to improve their vocabularies and spelling skills.
Reading
comprehension can be improved upon by the use of informational
texts. Students are taught to ask questions, use glossaries, tables
of content and chapter headings and title information in expository
texts to locate information. Students are expected to support
their answers with knowledge they can prove by using the text
itself. In third grade, students should be able to remember main
events and predict future events in the text. They should differentiate
between the main idea and secondary supports and be able to pull
important facts from the text to prove their answers.
Teachers expect the students to understand characters by their
actions and words and how the author describes them. They should
recognize and understand the universal themes present in literature
and how they relate to contemporary issues. Third graders should
be able to categorize literature by its forms, knowing that drama
is written as mostly dialogue with stage direction, poetry has
unique or sometimes no structure and prose can be fiction or factual.
They are expected to know the plots and literary devices of classic
fairy and folktales and should be able to compare myths from various
cultures to find the differences and similarities.
Grade Three Language Arts Worksheets:
Language
Skills, Parts
of Speech, Reading,
Reading
Comprehension, Writing
Students learn more about the words themselves and how they can
be used to evoke deeper meaning by their arrangement or usage.
New writing techniques are introduced and students learn how authors
use word patterns and imagery to add interest to their writing.
In writing, students focus on writing
paragraphs with a topic sentence and supporting sentences.
Students are introduced to cursive writing and learn the structure
of spacing and margins. Third graders learn more about libraries
and reference materials and how to use them. The students learn
the rules of writing
narrative and start to include more facts and information to drive
the plot and show why the specific subject matter was chosen.
Students are encouraged to provide details that cause readers
to experience the narrative through their senses. Conventions
of writing personal business letters and forms are introduced
with the student expected to be able to write invitations, thank
you notes, personal letters and business correspondence.
The elements of grammar that are so important in speaking are
just as important in writing,
if not more so. Third graders are taught to keep their subjects
and verbs in agreement, keep verb tenses consistent throughout
the piece and use subjects and verbs correctly. More punctuation
rules are introduced, as are more rules of capitalization. Students
are expected to recognize common homophones and know which one
to use. Vocabulary lists contain more words that are contractions
or have irregular endings when pluralized
or orthographic
patterns.
In the third grade classroom, students are encouraged to listen
to a speaker and be able to ask questions that show they have
comprehended what has been said. They should be able to identify
individual phrasings used by the speaker and be able to paraphrase
and tell the story in their own words.
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