Getting Ready for 3rd Grade

Students entering 3rd grade should be familiar with the following concepts/skills. It is not necessary for your child to have mastered every skill, but if you feel your child needs extra support in one of the following areas, it might be helpful to practice over the summer.

Reading & Phonics:

• Read grade-level appropriate books with ease and expression (approximately 80 words per minute).
• Apply phonics skills to decode unknown words.
• Read all previous grades’ high-frequency (sight) words with no hesitation (sight-word list).
• Recount key details of a story and identify the lesson/moral.
• Have beginning knowledge of how words and phrases supply rhythm and meaning in stories and poems.
• Identify different points of view within stories.
• Draw inferences based on text and illustrations in stories.
• Use various text features such as glossaries, appendices, and tables of contents.
• Identify the main purpose of a text (to entertain, inform, etc.).

Handwriting & Writing:

• Legibly write all upper-case and lower-case letters.
• Write short informative texts using facts and definitions gathered from resources.
• Write short opinion pieces using reasons to support opinions.
• Write short narratives describing a sequence of events and important details.
• Provide opening sentences to present a topic and an ending sentence to provide closure.

Language & Grammar:

• Use frequently occurring irregular plural nouns (feet, children, mice, teeth, etc.).
• Use the past tense of frequently occurring irregular verbs (sat, hid, told, etc.).
• Correctly use adjectives and adverbs when modifying a word.
• Expand simple sentences to create compound sentences.
• Demonstrate correct use of capitalization, punctuation, and spelling in writing.
  • Capitalize proper nouns.
  • Use commas to separate listed items.
  • Use apostrophes to form contractions and possessives.
  • Correctly use learned spelling patterns (ex: boy/boil, cage/badge).

Math:

• Identify, write, and count within 1,000. Skip count by 5s, 10s, and 100s.
• Solve one- and two-step word problems using addition or subtraction up to 100.
• Understand place value (ones, tens, hundreds, thousands).
• Fluently add and subtract within 100 using place value strategies.
• Demonstrate knowledge of odd and even numbers.
• Accurately tell time on an analog clock to the nearest five minutes.
• Measure the length of an object using the appropriate tools.
• Solve word problems using dollar bills and coins. Use appropriate symbols ($, ¢)
• Partition circles and rectangles into equal pieces.
  • Use halves, thirds, fourths, and quarters to describe the pieces.

Social Skills:

• Resect others’ personal space and their right to be heard.
• Follow directions and stay on task for at least 15 minutes.
• Keep track of personal items: paper, books, folders, etc.