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Third Grade

Each child passes through a range of social, academic and developmental stages at her own pace. Below are rough guidelines of what to look forward to in the year ahead.

In third grade your child will move beyond “learning to read” and will begin “reading to learn” and will start reading more for pleasure. Your child should enter third grade reading fluently and with comprehension. Students will be learning how to use a more formalized writing process of drafting, editing, and finalizing.

PHYSICAL AND SOCIAL SKILLS YOU CAN EXPECT OF YOUR THIRD GRADER:

  • Work cooperatively and productively with other children in small groups to complete projects
  • Understand how choices affect consequences
  • Become more organized and logical in thought process
  • Build stronger friendships
  • Be helpful, cheerful and pleasant – as well as rude, bossy, selfish and impatient
  • Better understand the consequences of behavior
  • Be more influenced by peer pressure because friends are very important at this stage
  • Want and expects immediate rewards for good behavior

ACADEMIC SKILLS YOU CAN EXPECT OF YOUR THIRD GRADER:

  • Be able to copy from a chalk board
  • Be able to write neatly in cursive because the small muscles of the hand have developed
  • Read longer stories and chapter books with expression and comprehension
  • Use prefixes, suffixes, root words and other strategies to identify unfamiliar words
  • Multiply single and multi-digit numbers (3 x 4,652)
  • Divide multi-digit numbers by one-digit numbers (165 / 5)
  • Tell time to the half-hour, quarter-hour, five minutes and one minute

Meet the Teachers

A boy blowing bubbles

Read with your child

To prepare for third grade, take your child to the library and have him pick out books of interest at his reading level. Continue to read aloud to your child and ask comprehension questions about the text, to see if he understands the who, what, where, when and how of what he is reading.

Master math skills at home

In math your child will learn the multiplication tables, how to tell time to the minute and how to solve problems with fractions. To practice fractions at home you can ask your child to divide fruit such as an apple into fractional parts of halves, thirds and fourths. You can also have your child divide into equal shares. For example, if there are six cookies and three people, you can ask, “How many cookies does each person receive?” Learning to solve problems in math is a critical skill, and many of the math standards and tests expect children to be able to reason through problems. Ask your child to explain how he found the answer.

Technology is also an important part of the third grade classroom. Read more about Instructional Technology at Clarkston Community Schools.

From "What to Expect in Third Grade" by Miriam Myers, www.greatschools.org.