Stories, Evidence & Text Features

The big idea

This unit sets up the reader's notebook and the habit of proving answers with words from the text. Your child names characters, setting and sequence, infers character traits, and finds the central message in fables, folktales and myths. The unit ends with informational text features such as headings, captions, diagrams, glossaries and indexes.

Standards in plain words

• RL.3.1 Asks and answers questions about a story and points to the words in the text that show the answer.
• RL.3.2 Retells stories, including fables, folktales and myths from many cultures, and explains the lesson and the details that show it.
• RL.3.3 Describes characters' traits, reasons and feelings and explains how their actions move the story along.
• RL.3.5 Uses words like chapter, scene and stanza when talking about stories, plays and poems, and explains how each part builds on the one before.
• RL.3.7 Explains how the illustrations add to what the words say, for example by showing mood or a character.
• RI.3.4 Works out the meaning of school words and subject words in a nonfiction text.
• RI.3.5 Uses text features and search tools, such as headings, key words and indexes, to find information quickly.
• RI.3.7 Uses pictures, maps, diagrams and words together to understand where, when, why and how things happen.
• W.3.3 Writes real or imagined stories with characters, dialogue, details, time-order words and a clear ending.
• SL.3.1 Takes part in discussions: comes prepared, follows the rules, asks questions, builds on others' ideas and explains their own.
• SL.3.2 Tells the main ideas and details of something read aloud or shown in pictures, numbers or speech.
• RF.3.3 Uses phonics and word parts, including prefixes, suffixes and syllables, to read new words.
• L.3.1 Uses correct grammar: parts of speech, plurals, verb tenses, subject-verb agreement, comparing words, joining words and different kinds of sentences.
• L.3.2 Uses capitals, commas, quotation marks, possessives and correct spelling, and checks spellings in a dictionary.

Anchor texts

• Original short stories in the lessons: Rosa's story, the Jada, Owen and Priya stories, and 'The Note in the Library Book'
• Aesop's fables (public domain): 'The Tortoise and the Hare,' 'The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse,' 'The Lion and the Mouse,' 'The Dove and the Ant,' 'The Ant and the Grasshopper' and 'The Boy Who Cried Wolf'
• 'Stone Soup,' a folktale retold in the lesson
• The Greek myth of Demeter and Persephone, retold in the lesson
• Original honeybee article 'How Honeybees Make Honey' for text features

Watch across the unit

• Watch for: Answering from memory or opinion instead of going back to the text.

  Try: Make 'look back' the rule: your child puts a finger on the words before answering, and highlights the evidence on tests.

• Watch for: Giving an event ('The tortoise won') or a feeling ('happy') when asked for a lesson or a trait.

  Try: Ask 'What should a reader learn from that?' for lessons, and 'Is she like that most of the time, or only right now?' for traits.

• Watch for: Mixing up the glossary and the index.

  Try: Use the saying 'Glossary tells what it means; index tells where it is.'