What your 3rd grader should have learned

Did your child master the skills they need to be ready for next year? Here’s a rough idea of the academic and social skills that kids acquire in third grade. If your child hasn’t mastered some of these skills, don’t worry. No two kids are alike, especially when it comes to hitting developmental benchmarks. Choose a few to practice this summer, but keep things low key, both for you and for your child. Fostering your child’s love of learning is a lifelong strength that outweighs any individual skill.

By the end of 3rd grade, kids should be able to:

Work cooperatively on group projects with other kids.
Demonstrate increasingly organized and logical thinking.
Write neatly and legibly.
Write a one-page opinion paper, report, or story with an introduction and a conclusion.
With the help of an adult, use a keyboard to type what they write.
Read third grade-level books aloud with expression and comprehension (get reading comprehension practice; see an example of a third grader reading fluently and with expression).
Use strategies, such as looking at prefixes, suffixes, and root words, to read and understand new and unfamiliar words (get practice with prefixes and suffixes and root words).
Multiply and divide with numbers up to 100 (get multiplication and division practice).
Tell time to the nearest minute (get time-telling practice).
Identify places on a map using directions, borders, longitude and latitude lines, the equator, and the North and South Poles.
Know the basic physical components of the earth, such as land forms, water, climate, and weather.