What your child needs to know by the end of third grade:

 

National PTA Organization

 

Literacy and English Language Arts:

 

Third grade is a pivotal year for your child. Learning to read with fluency and confidence will
serve as a foundation for the reading demands in later grades. By practicing with

learning-to-read strategies, your child will reliably be able to make sense of multisyllable

words in books. He or she will come to appreciate that words have meanings that are not

literal(e.g., a piece of cake) and have relationships to other words (e.g., company and companion).

Recognizing and understanding words will help your child read increasingly challenging

stories and books and build knowledge about the world around him or her. By the end of

the year, your child also will be writing clear sentences and paragraphs on a range of topics,

drawing on an expanding vocabulary.

 

What they will learn in third grade:

■ Reading closely to find main ideas and supporting details in a story
■ Describing the logical connection between particular sentences and paragraphs in stories
(e.g., first, second, third; cause and effect)
■ Comparing the most important points and key details presented in two books on the same topic
■ Writing opinions or explanations that group related information and develop topics with facts
and details
■ Writing stories that establish a situation and include details and clear sequences of events that describe the actions, thoughts, and feelings of characters
■ Independently conducting short research projects that build knowledge about various topics
■ Asking and answering questions about information he or she hears from a speaker or while participating in classroom discussions, offering appropriate elaboration and detail that build on what others have said
■ Reading stories and poems aloud fluently, without pausing to figure out what each word means
■ Distinguishing the literal and nonliteral meanings of words, such as something’s fishy and cold shoulder
■ Spelling correctly and consulting dictionaries to clarify meanings of words

 

Mathematics:

In 3rd grade, your child will learn important new ideas and gain important new skills. One
of the most important topics this year is multiplication and division. Another is fractions.
Multiplication, division, and fractions are the building blocks for many life skills that
students will learn in later grades, such as percentages. Students also need to master
these topics to be ready for algebra and advanced math, so it is essential to get a good
start with these topics in 3rd grade.

 

What your child will learn in third grade:

■ Multiplying and dividing up to 10 × 10 quickly and accurately, including knowing the times tables from memory
■ Solving word problems using addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division
■ Beginning to multiply numbers with more than one digit (e.g., multiplying 9 × 80)
■ Understanding fractions and relating them to the familiar system of whole numbers (e.g.,
recognizing that 3⁄1 and 3 are the same number)

■ Measuring and estimating weights and liquid volumes, and solving word problems involving
these quantities
■ Reasoning about shapes (e.g., all squares are rectangles but not all rectangles are squares)
■ Finding areas of shapes, and relating area to multiplication (e.g., why is the number of square
feet for a 9-foot by 7-foot room given by the product 9 × 7?)