📚 3rd grade English Language Arts: how to help at home

What each unit covers

1. 📚Read and Think

   Reading short original stories and non-fiction passages, then finding the main idea, details and order of events, making inferences and working out word meanings from context.

2. 🎭Story Elements

   Naming the characters, setting, problem and solution of a story, describing how characters feel and what they are like, and finding a story's lesson.

3. 🧩Word Jobs

   Finding nouns (naming words), verbs (action words), adjectives (describing words) and adverbs (words that tell how) in sentences.

4. ✒️Punctuation Power

   Choosing end marks, using commas in lists and dates, writing contractions and possessives with apostrophes, and putting quotation marks around speech.

5. 🐝Spelling Patterns

   Spelling long vowel sounds with vowel teams (ai, ay, ee, ea, oa, ow, igh, ie) and adding -ed and -ing by doubling a letter, dropping a silent e or just adding the ending.

6. 🔧Prefixes & Suffixes

   Learning what prefixes (un-, re-, pre-, dis-) and suffixes (-ful, -less, -er, -ly) mean, finding base words and using new words in sentences.

7. 🔁Word Pairs

   Synonyms (words that mean the same), antonyms (opposites) and homophones (words that sound alike but are spelled differently, like their, there and they're).

8. 📝Sentence Smarts

   Telling statements, questions, exclamations and commands apart, spotting incomplete sentences and joining ideas with so, but, or and because.

9. 🔤ABC Order & Dictionary

   Putting words in alphabetical order to the first, second and third letter, and using dictionary guide words to find the right page.

10. ⚙️Grammar Gears

    Showing who owns something with 's, choosing linking verbs and -ing verbs, using question words like which and whose, and spotting prepositions and interjections.

11. 🔍Reading Patterns

    Spotting cause and effect and order of importance, deciding who is telling a story, making inferences from clues, and using an index.

12. 🔍Wonder & Find Out

    Practices using what you already know, asking focused questions, choosing information from sources, deciding what to include, and noticing diversity and inclusion in stories.

13. 📣Media Messages

    Children sort media by purpose (to inform, persuade or entertain), notice how ads use music, famous people and strong words, tell facts from opinions, and choose good sources for research questions.

14. 🖼️Word Pictures

    Understanding metaphors and similes, hearing repeated vowel sounds (assonance), and choosing strong, exact words.

15. 📝Plan Your Writing

    Practices choosing a topic from experience, thinking about audience and purpose, using planning tools such as webs and organizers, and telling narrative, informational, descriptive and persuasive writing apart.

16. ✏️Make Writing Better

    Practices adding descriptive words, joining ideas with connecting and transition words, noticing when writing doesn't make sense, revising with feedback, and neat handwriting and word processing.

17. 👂Listening & Talking Together

    Practices listening for key ideas, using non-verbal cues and turn taking, asking thoughtful questions, giving evidence, and sharing thoughts and preferences in a group.

18. 🖼️Posters, Slides & Media

    Practices multimodal texts (posters, slide shows, videos, photo essays), planning a layout, choosing visuals and fonts, and picking the best way to share a message with an audience.

19. 📚Kinds of Texts

    Your child names a text's genre from its features (fable, biography, tall tale, play, informational text) and makes text-to-self, text-to-text and text-to-world connections, including tales from different cultures.

20. 🖼️Pictures, Features and Points of View

    Your child explains what illustrations, diagrams, maps, timelines and captions add to the words, notices when their own view differs from the author's, narrator's or a character's, and tells casual talk from the clearer language used in school writing.

21. ✏️Claims, Stories and Responses

    Your child picks claims, reasons and evidence and a fitting conclusion, then the parts of a strong story (a hook, dialogue, descriptive details, showing feelings, order words and an ending) and creative ways to respond to a text.