Writing reports and other kinds of informational pieces is a skill unto itself. It requires an understanding of organizing and sequencing thoughts, tying them together in a way that makes sense to the reader and sometimes a bit of research. It is recommended that students participate in writing their own informational essay on a topic of their choice. This will allow them to apply all that they are learning through the exercises in this unit.

Third grade writers will be tasked with writing longer and more complicated sentences. This guided lesson in understanding, constructing and punctuating sentences can support kids as they learn to build bigger and better sentences in their writing. Grammar instruction and practical examples were written by our curriculum experts, complete with a list of recommended building sentence worksheets for third graders.

As students become more sophisticated writers, they begin to understand that words have different “jobs” in a sentence. These jobs can be thought of as parts of speech. In this word study unit, students will learn about the work that transition words, prepositions, verbs, adverbs and adjectives do. Students will also explore how certain kinds of words work together, like verbs and adverbs.

Second grade writers often need extra support with the rules of capitalization, puncuation, apostrophes, and proper nouns. The exercises in this guided lesson cover these four key grammar rules, and provide kids with targeted exercises to help them practice writing with correct grammar usage. To help gain even more practice with new writing skills, download and print the capitalization and punctuation worksheets suggested as part of this lesson.

Sight words are commonly founds words that are not easy to decode because they don't follow set phonics rules (and must be learned by sight). Examples of sight words commonly found in first grade texts are would, thank, rain, and should. This guided lesson introduces first grader readers to even more sight words to help boost their comprehension and fluency.