Goals for the End of Third Grade
3rd grade represents a milestone year in your child’s academic life. This school year marks the decisive point at which your child transitions from “learning to read” to “reading to learn”. Children who have not become proficient readers will start to fall behind and without the help of parents and teachers, may stay behind.
Parents, along with teachers and schools, must identify struggling readers and begin interventions immediately, such as tutoring and reading practice. If your child is not performing well or avoiding reading, parents should act urgently to determine the source of their difficulties. Don’t delay, set up an appointment with their teacher to voice your concerns.
3rd grade children are independent learners, they read instructions and begin activities on their own.
Children can read comfortably on their own, on a 3rd grade reading level.
Children understand how prefixes (re-, pre-, non-, un-) and suffixes (-less, -ly, -able, -ful) can change the base words meaning, for example: use has a different meaning when changed to “reuse” or “useful”.
Children become fully independent readers, searching out new books and book series and researching ideas online with less help from adults.
Children can explain the main idea and supporting details after reading.
Children can summarize what they have just read.
They read from a variety of genres - plays, magazine articles, poems, history as well as chapter books and nonfiction reading.
Children can engage in in-depth story analysis and compare elements of two different books.
Children can offer their opinions, either agreeing or disagreeing with information presented in a story.
When reading a factual or informational text, they can remember the most important details: its main purpose and the 5 W’s: “who”, “what,” “where,” “when,” “why,” and “how” of the story.
Children may be continuing to master high-level sight words.
Children begin to regularly use the dictionary and thesaurus for help with spelling a word and understanding new terms.
Children become more skilled at using the writing process (gathering ideas, writing a rough draft, revising, editing and publishing) to complete pieces of writing.
Children can write in paragraph form and write multiple paragraphs for a report.
