Grade 3 · English

Grade 3 English

Grade 3 is when reading questions start asking “how do you know?” Children read chapter books and non-fiction on their own, and are expected to back up their answers. Here is what it covers, where kids usually get stuck, and one way to help.

What your child learns this year

Every curriculum words it differently, but most grade 3 classes cover the same ground:

Reading longer texts. Chapter books, and non-fiction with headings, captions and diagrams.
Answering with evidence. Finding the words in the text that prove an answer.
Main idea and details. What a paragraph or story is mostly about, and the details that support it.
Writing paragraphs. Stories, opinions with reasons, and short reports, each with a beginning, middle and end.
Grammar. Past and present tense, quotation marks for speech, and apostrophes for owners (the dog's bone).

Where kids usually get stuck

1Answering from memory. Saying what they remember instead of checking the page, or picking a sentence that is true but doesn't prove the answer.
2Mixing up plurals and owners. “The dogs bone” needs an apostrophe: dog's. “Two dog's” doesn't: dogs.
3Changing tense in the middle of a story. “We went to the park and we play on the swings.” A story told in the past stays in the past.

One of Pip's tricks

Prove it from the page

Use it when answering a reading question, especially one that asks “How do you know?” or “Which sentence shows…?”

Say your answer first.
Go back to the text and find the exact sentence or words that show it.
Point to it or copy it, then say how it proves your answer.

Watch it work. “The barred owl sleeps in a tall tree all day. When the sun goes down, it swoops over the field to catch mice. Its feathers are brown and white.” Which sentence proves the owl hunts at night? Sleeping all day and brown feathers don't show hunting. “When the sun goes down, it swoops over the field to catch mice” does.

Why it works: a reading question is about what this text says, so an answer only counts when words on the page back it up. Going back also catches answers you remembered wrong.

Try three

Tap a choice to see if it is right, with the reason.

1.“Maya's shoelace snapped just before the race. She tied the two ends together, lined up with the others, and ran anyway. She came third, and she was grinning.” How do you know Maya was happy at the end?
2.“Bees visit hundreds of flowers a day. They carry pollen from one flower to the next. Without bees, many plants could not make seeds.” Which sentence proves bees matter to plants?
3.Which is correct?

How Sparkpip fits in

Pip, Sparkpip's tutor, works through texts and questions like these with your child one small step at a time, using tricks like the one above.

Start free See how it works

Your curriculum

Sparkpip is built on the grade 3 English curriculum for your province or state. The official pages:

Also: Grade 2 English · Grade 4 English · Grade 3 math · Grade 3 science