Third Grade Reading Assignments

How to Help Your Child With Third Grade Reading Assignments

Reading speed and comprehension can be difficult for some children, which can cause frustration and decrease your child's motivation to complete reading homework assignments. However, there are several types of at-home exercises and activities that you can provide to help your child develop his or her skills. Use the following online resources to give your son or daughter additional practice, which can improve performance on future third grade reading assignments.

Reading Improvement Resources

Reading Bingo

Because reading frequently is one of the best ways to help your child improve both speed and comprehension, you can select a reading game that focuses on setting and achieving a volume goal. One game that many kids are familiar with is Bingo, and you can find free templates online with grade-appropriate book titles and genres filled in. To play, your child will select a book title from the Bingo card and, after reading it, he or she can cross it off the card. Five in a row wins.

Alternatively, you may take the Bingo template and adapt it for comprehension questions. Common reading comprehension questions for third graders are also available online if you have trouble developing your own. This type of activity is beneficial because it holds your child accountable for his or her reading at home.

Interactive Word Sort

To develop long-word decoding skills, it can be helpful for beginning readers to study word structure and letter sounds. Interactive activities also provide children the opportunity to gain hands-on experience. Several of these activities are available for free online, and ReadWriteThink offers a Word Family Sort exercise for beginning or struggling readers (www.readwritethink.org). If you have access to the Internet, your child can easily use the lesson by first selecting a vowel to focus on. The activity will then take your child to a screen with four word families using that vowel, and he or she will place each new word that pops up under the correct column. The repetition of this activity is good practice for those that have a difficult time sounding out new words.

Alternate Endings

Drawing conclusions and critical thinking are of key importance when trying to improve your child's reading ability. Although basic reading passages and comprehension questions are useful, it's likely that your son or daughter has done several of these in class already. A similar, but more hands-on exercise, is to have your child create alternate endings for several short stories. You can either have your child do this for stories you already own, or you may use an online worksheet created for this purpose. Let your child read the story and then write a new ending. Then, take some time to have him or her explain the choices made and why the conclusions make sense based on the story.