South Dakota ELA 3.L.6

ELA3rd GradeLanguage

The Standard

Acquire and use accurately grade-appropriate conversational, general academic, and domain-specific words and phrases to convey ideas precisely.

South Dakota English Language Arts Standards (2025)

Teacher's field guide

What Students Need to Do: Students choose words and phrases that say exactly what they mean. They use everyday language, school words such as compare, and subject words such as evaporate when they speak and write.
What Mastery Looks Like: A student says, “The water evaporated in the sun,” instead of “It went away.” They can use while to compare a sunny puddle with a shaded one and explain why their words fit.
Common Misconceptions: Students may use evaporate for water that soaks into a sponge. They may think compare means naming only differences. Some choose a longer word even when it changes their meaning.
How to Assess It: Write: “One puddle in the sun shrank. One puddle in the shade stayed the same size.” Ask students to explain what likely happened in two sentences using evaporated and while.

Lesson moves

Give pairs a sponge and plastic lid; have them add water and say which absorbs it and which leaves it on the surface.
Ask, “Which explains a drying puddle better: The water disappeared or The water evaporated? Why?”
Play word swap: teams improve “The puddles are different” using while, sunny, and shaded, then read their sentence aloud.
Read tomorrow’s local forecast, then write a sentence predicting whether a wet sidewalk will dry, using evaporate accurately.

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A ready-to-print activity worksheet aligned to 3.L.6, with an answer key for the teacher on its own page. No account needed.

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