Third Grade Lesson Plans for Spelling

These simple third grade lesson plans are ones that you can use many times throughout the school year.  Just use a new set of spelling words each time. See my list of third grade spelling words for words to "plug in" to these lessons.

As a former classroom teacher, homeschool teacher, and longtime published educational writer, I love to create lessons, activities, worksheets and games that you will find easy to use, and your students will enjoy using! Best of all, learning is sure to happen!

My AnyWord worksheets, partner games and writing prompts will also provide you with lots of material for your lessons. These also can be used with nearly any set of spelling words, across many grade levels. Once you find a format that you and your students like, you can use it over and over. 

1. Story Puzzles

1. Using a chalkboard or whiteboard, write a short story together with your child or as a class. (A story from 5 sentences up to 3 paragraphs in length will work well.) Use as many spelling words as possible.

2. Read the story aloud together 2 or 3 times. 

3. Erase the spelling words in the story.

4. Call on one student to read the story aloud, remembering to add in the words that were erased.

5. Ask several students to come to the board to fill in the missing words.

6. Repeat the process with a new story. This time, however, ask each student to write the entire story, with his own paper and pencil, filling in all the missing words.  

7. As students become comfortable with this process, you can can omit almost any important word that's within the spelling range of most students. Don't limit yourself to only the spelling words. Review any word, any time!

2. Is It Right? - A Listening Lesson

Here's another one of my third grade lesson plans. This is a very simple format that you may wish to use frequently with your elementary students. Kids must listen carefully and know the correct spellings of words.

Here's how to conduct the simple lesson: 

Choose a list of 10 spelling words, either current or past.  Then speak to your child or students as follows:

"Write your name at the top of your paper. Number your paper from 1 to 10.  In this lesson, I will say a word, spell it and say it again. You need to listen carefully to hear if I spell the word correctly. "

"If I spell the word correctly, put a Y for yes by the number. If I do not spell the word correctly, put an N for no. "

Examples:

Here are sample words you could use for your third grade lesson plans:

1. about - ABOUT - about (Y)
2. across - ACCROSS - across (N) 
3. afraid - AFRAID - afraid (Y)
4. birthday - BRITHDAY - birthday (N)
5. bread - BREAD - bread (Y)
6. dinner - DINNER - dinner (Y)
7. doctor - DOCTER - doctor (N)
8. early - ERLY - early (N)
9. everyone - EVERYONE - everyone (Y)
10. forgot - FERGOT - forgot (N)

When you're finished, ask everyone to correct their own papers as you go over the correct answers. If there are disagreements, be sure to repeat what you said so that students will LISTEN carefully again to the spelling. 

After you've done this a few times, you may want to ask students to take turns being the "teacher." Ask two students per week to each prepare 5 spelling words, as shown above. Allow those students to spell/misspell their five words as shown and lead in the correction of papers.

Students learn best when they teach others!

More Ideas for Third Grade Lesson Plans

3rd Grade Activities - 25 spelling dictation sentences and full instructions. Use a few of these each week to provide students with extra practice in writing, spelling and using spelling words in context. 

These writing prompts for 3rd grade ask:  If you joined the circus, what act would you like to do? Do you like to wear matched socks? Why or why not? Why were you not afraid of the giant who walked into your classroom? Set contains 12 prompts in all. 

How to teach spelling - Even if you've been teaching for years, you might find it helpful to brush up on these fundamentals.

3rd grade vocabulary words - Introduce your students to these 200 key words and concepts frequently throughout the year. After they know these words orally, they can begin to learn to spell them!  Words are carefully researched across multiple textbooks and online resources. 

Double the Fun - To double or not to double the final consonant when adding a suffix? That's one of the trickiest new skills to learn in third grade, so why not practice it as a game? Here's another great activity for 3rd grade spelling fun! 

Ann Richmond Fisher is a longtime published educational writer, a former classroom teacher and a former homeschool teacher. Ann's spelling bee resources, graded spelling word lists, spelling games, worksheets, and other language arts resources have become respected around the globe since she launched Spelling-Words-Well in 2010.

Ann is also the creator of www.word-game-world.com.

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