Third grade: What your child should know
Keep tabs on your third-grader's development with this handy checklist.
No two kids are alike, especially when it comes to hitting developmental benchmarks. But it helps to have a rough idea of which academic and social skills your child should acquire at his or her grade level. Learn more about the third-grade classroom in these subject areas: reading, writing, language arts, math, science, technology, social studies, art, music, and physical education.
By the end of the year, you can expect your child to:
- Work cooperatively and productively with other children in small groups to complete projects
- Understand how choices affect consequences
- Become more organized and logical in her thinking processes
- Build stronger friendships
- Be more influenced by peer pressure because friends are very important at this stage
- Like immediate rewards for behavior
- Be able to copy from a chalkboard
- 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, and root words and other strategies to identify unfamiliar words
- Multiply single- and multi-digit numbers
- Divide multi-digit numbers by one-digit numbers
- Tell time to the quarter- and half-hour and to five minutes and one minute
