Grade 3 ELA Activities

This activity may provide a good use for some of the junk mail that comes to your home. Every day we receive offers for new credit cards, products, games, or prizes. Reading and understanding these offers require locating small details and determining which facts are important.

	An offer for a product, credit card, game, or prize (on a piece of junk mail or the back of a cereal box, for example)

	Pen or highlighter

When you receive an offer for a product in the mail, take a moment to look at it with your child. Read and discuss the details of the offer. Where are they located? How are they presented? What does a reader have to know in order to determine what is really being offered? Have you really won a million dollars (as the envelope might claim)? Encourage your child to highlight the details of the offer and read the fine print. Also, she will need to read and determine what is most important in order to decide what to highlight.

Have your child summarize the most important details of the offer in a few short sentences. After going over these critical details, discuss whether your family should be interested in the offer. Or, you might have her compare and contrast one offer with another, then explain which offer she prefers and why. Talk about other places offers are found: cereal boxes, the Internet, or billboards, for example. You could take this one step further by discussing the purposes of the offers.

This activity highlights the importance of paying close attention to details (especially those presented in fine print). Additionally, the activity reveals some of the common features of persuasive writing, where paying attention to details is particularly important. Continue to look closely at advertisements, offers, and any persuasive language that you and your child see. When thinking about the language, ask such questions as, “What does the ad on the side of the bus tell us? What other details would we need to find out about it?” These conversations will help your child grasp the importance of understanding the facts and details in what she reads.

 Grade 3 ELA Activities