3rd Grade English Language Arts

Students will actively listen using agreed-upon discussion rules.

Students will actively listen and interpret a speaker’s verbal messages and ask questions to clarify the speaker’s purpose.

Students will work effectively and respectfully in diverse groups by sharing responsibility for collaborative work and recognizing individual contributions made by each group member.

Students will engage in collaborative discussions about what they are reading and writing, expressing their own ideas clearly in pairs, diverse groups, and whole-class settings.

Students will report in a group or individually on a topic or text, tell a story, or recount an experience with relevant facts, descriptive details, speaking audibly and clearly in coherent sentences.

Students will add, delete, substitute, and reverse phonemes in spoken words (e.g., add /g/ to the beginning of listen to say glisten; delete the /b/ in bridges to say ridges; substitute the /f/ in frighten with /b/ to say brighten; reverse the initial and final sounds in safe to say face).

Students will correctly form words in print and cursive and use appropriate spacing for letters, words, and sentences.

Students will decode multisyllabic words using their knowledge of the following phonics skills: vowel diphthongs, all major syllable types (i.e., closed, consonant +le, open, vowel digraphs, vowel silent e, r-controlled).

Students will decode words by applying knowledge of structural analysis: contractions, abbreviations, common roots and related prefixes and suffixes, morphology.

Students will use decoding skills and semantics in context when reading new words in a text, including multisyllabic words.

Students will use correct spelling when writing the following sounds in words: diphthongs, schwa (i.e., /ə/), silent letter combinations (e.g., knew, could, ghost), hard/soft c, g (e.g., cover, celebrate, gorilla, general).

Students will use correct spelling when writing the following syllable types in single-syllable and multisyllabic words: vowel digraphs, consonant + -le.

Students will use structural analysis to correctly spell the following parts of words: common prefixes, common suffixes, common spelling rules related to adding prefixes and suffixes (e.g., changing y to i, doubling a consonant).

Students will expand their sight word vocabulary by reading regularly- and irregularly-spelled words in isolation and context with increasing automaticity.

Students will orally and accurately read grade-level text at a smooth rate with expression that connotes comprehension.

Students will determine the main idea and supporting details of a text.

Students will identify elements of various genres in fiction, poetry, and nonfiction texts.

Students will summarize and sequence the important events of a story.

Students will summarize facts and details from an informational text.

Students will routinely use a recursive process to prewrite, organize, and develop narrative, informative, and opinion drafts that display evidence of paragraphing.

Students will routinely use a recursive process to revise content for clarity, coherence, and organization (e.g., logical order and transitions).

Students will routinely and recursively edit drafts for punctuation, capitalization, and correctly-spelled grade-level words, using resources as needed.

Students will routinely use a recursive process to publish final drafts for an authentic audience (e.g., reading aloud, posting on blog, displaying, entering contest).

Students will determine if the author’s purpose is to entertain, inform, or persuade.

Students will determine whether a grade-level literary text is narrated in first- or third-person point of view.

Students will find examples of literary elements: setting, plot, characters, characterization.

Students will find examples of literary devices: personification, hyperbole, simile, alliteration, onomatopoeia.

Students will answer inferential questions, using a text to support answers.

Students will distinguish fact from opinion in an informational text.

Students will describe the structure of an informational text: problem/solution, description, sequential.

Students will write narratives incorporating: setting, plot, characters, characterization.

Students will write facts about a subject, including a main idea with supporting details, in multiple paragraphs with transitional words and phrases.

Students will write an opinion about a topic and provide relevant evidence as support in multiple paragraphs with transitional words and phrases.

Students will identify relationships among words, including synonyms, antonyms, homophones, and homographs.

Students will use context clues to clarify the meaning of words.

Students will use word parts (e.g., affixes, Anglo-Saxon roots, stems) to define and determine the meaning of new words.

Students will consult reference materials (e.g., dictionaries, glossaries, thesauruses) to comprehend the words in a text.

Students will acquire new grade-level vocabulary, relate new words to prior knowledge, and apply vocabulary in various contexts.

Students will use grade-level vocabulary in writing to clearly communicate ideas.

Students will use precise vocabulary in writing for the intended mode and effect on the audience.

Students will recognize simple and compound sentences.

Students will recognize parts of speech in sentences: concrete, abstract, and possessive nouns; different types of verbs (i.e., action, linking, helping) and their roles in a sentence; the complete subject and complete predicate of a sentence; possessive adjectives; prepositional phrases; possessive pronouns and the nouns they replace; coordinating conjunctions (i.e., for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so); adverbs of frequency (e.g., always, often, never).

Students will compose simple and compound declarative, interrogative, imperative, and exclamatory sentences, avoiding and correcting fragments.

Students will use nouns, verbs, adjectives, prepositions, and adverbs to add clarity and variety to their writing.

Students will capitalize and punctuate titles of respect, words in titles, and geographical names.

Students will use periods with declarative and imperative sentences, question marks with interrogative sentences, and exclamation points with exclamatory sentences.

Students will use apostrophes to form complex contractions (e.g., should’ve, won’t, y’all) and to show possession.

Students will use commas before a coordinating conjunction and to separate individual words in a series.

Students will use a colon to indicate time.

Students will conduct research to answer questions, including self-generated questions, and to build knowledge.

Students will identify and use text features (e.g., graphics, captions, subheadings, italics, charts, tables, legends) to comprehend informational texts.

Students will begin to determine the relevance of the information gathered.

Students will choose a topic of interest and generate several questions about it for research.

Students will begin to organize information found during research, following a modified citation style (i.e., author, title, publication year).

Students will write informative texts independently for short timeframes (e.g., a single sitting or a day or two) that organize related information about a topic and convey details from a single source.

Students will explore and compare ideas and topics in multimodal content.

Students will use a combination of writing, sound, visual content, and/or movement to communicate ideas, thoughts, and feelings.

Students will select texts for academic and personal purposes and read independently for extended periods of time.

Students will write independently using print and/or typing over various lengths of time for a variety of purposes.