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Grade 3 Benchmarks

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The student begins to acquire a way of thinking about writing and understands purposes for writing:

                * uses a variety of organizers to plan, record and explain ideas and information

                * follows a plan for gathering and recording ideas and information

                * listens to others’ ideas and offers feedback

                * with guidance seeks feedback and suggestions from others about own writing

                * chooses to write for pleasure

                * shows originality in word choices

                * shows feeling

                * uses excitement, humour and suspense

                * creates characters and events from outside personal environment

                * incorporates feelings, ideas, themes and structures from books in writing (“Reads like a

                   writer & Writes like a reader”

                * produces writing that is organized and makes sense with a beginning, middle and end

                * sequences ideas one after the other

                * demonstrates even pacing throughout the beginning, middle and end

                * with guidance begins to use obvious transitions to link one sentence to the next

                * produces some sentences that read smoothly while others still need work

The student produces various types of writing for different audiences and purposes:

                * adds great beginnings, interesting details and uses a variety of word choices in personal

                   narrative and fiction (memories, comic strips, plays)

                * writes short fiction with guidance

                * writes a variety of short nonfiction pieces (reports, letters and lists)

                * writes poetry with guidance

The student demonstrates an understanding the following conventions:

                * high usage words are spelled correctly and all others are easy to read even though not

                   100% correct

                * applies basic capitalization rules correctly

                * punctuation marks are used effectively to guide the reader through the text

                * there is evidence of correct grammar in writing

                * different sentence beginnings and lengths add pleasing rhythm to the writing