Organize, Brainstorm and Conquer with These 3rd Grade Writing Worksheets

Brainstorming

While some students may be able to free-write with minimal direction, most students will create better work if they have a bit more structure. Learning scaffolding methods in elementary school will better prepare them for success in their later academic career, and being able to self-structure will help them convey their ideas clearly and in a logical order.

Build These Skills

Brainstorming uses a relaxed, informal set of guidelines to engage lateral thinking and creative problem-solving. It allows people to come up with ideas that may range from irrelevant to obvious and even outlandish. Using these initial ideas as a starting point, they can be expanded into original, creative efforts, or as a new starting point to brainstorm even more ideas.

Activities to Try

Have students brainstorm ideas for their writing individually, in groups or as a class. The brainstorming sessions don’t have to match up with how the assignment they’re brainstorming for will be completed—in fact, it can be useful to do individual brainstorming before beginning a group project or brainstorming as a class before having students work on individual projects.

• Brainstorm using different techniques like making lists, collecting pictures to create mood boards or combining the two techniques and trying mind maps.
• Keep track of your students’ past brainstorming sessions and don’t hesitate to bring them out again in the future if you need a quick list of ideas for another assignment.

Recommended Read Pre-Writing Worksheets: Introducing Brainstorming and Ideation to Elementary Students

Writing Checklist

A worksheet that covers all of the components of a self-edit is especially helpful for younger students who aren’t yet fluent in the entire process of writing and editing.

Having a writing checklist that lists all the most important points to cover to be sure that a piece of writing is ready for grading is useful for both the students and the teacher; you give your students all the information they need to be successful so that they can take responsibility for their own success.

Build These Skills

Self-editing is a valuable skill for anyone to have, regardless of where their life takes them. Everything from a text message to a presentation at a board meeting is improved by making sure the topic is supported by the text.

The writing needs to be clear and to the point, and spelling and grammatical mistakes should be kept to a minimum. This requires a clear understanding of the purpose of the writing, the expected format of the writing, a sense of logic, how one sentence leads to the next and a focus on the topic at hand.

Activities to Try

• Use a Paragraph as a Class Activity: Display a paragraph with spelling, grammar, clarity, and tone issues. Have students take turns suggesting edits aloud.

• Peer Checklist Swap: During writing assignments, have students exchange work and fill out a writing checklist for each other.

• Deep-Dive Peer Edits: Pair students to revise each other’s work by removing wordiness and improving unclear sentences.

• Checklist Scoring Game: Assign point values to checklist items. Students earn points for items completed during the first draft and after edits. Set a “minimum score” for final submission.

Recommended Read Writing and Editing Checklists for Elementary Schoolers

Writing Starters

Sometimes the hardest part of an assignment is getting started! Even if your students have notes and worksheets full of ideas they want to write about, they may be stuck on trying to think up the perfect beginning.

Whether it’s lack of confidence in their writing, fear of failure or a convenient way to procrastinate from doing the work, it can be useful to have a few good opening lines tucked in your pocket to get the blank page over with. If students seem hesitant to commit, remind them that they can always change the beginning later.

Build These Skills

Writing starters will help students push past their insecurities and build confidence in their writing. While it can be easy to become overwhelmed by thinking about how much work needs to be done, the best way to decrease the amount is to do some of the work.

Once the seal is broken by writing anything, most students will continue writing with less mental resistance and will find a pace and rhythm that works for them. It can be a good idea to encourage students to choose their own favorite ways to start different types of writing, then they’ll never have to contend with writer’s block that comes from the lack of a place to start.

Writing Starter Activities to Try

• Write 5 different beginnings for one prompt (real or silly)
• Try timed free-writes to boost fluency—focus on quantity first
• Collect and save favorite beginnings from books and articles
• Create a shared doc for class-favorite openings to inspire each other

Main Idea

A riff on the idea of a paragraph outline, this worksheet helps students stay on topic by putting the topic right in the middle of the page and then connecting it to important details that radiate out from the center.

This method of visualizing the topic can be useful for visual learners who enjoy outlining with mind maps and other more abstract methods of consolidating ideas, while still working for students that prefer to organize their thoughts more linearly in a standard outline structure.

Word Lists

At the 3rd grade level, it’s important to expand beyond the usual vocabulary quizzes and come up with activities that will help students learn new words while also being fun and engaging. 3rd graders tend to have a good grip on many vocabulary words, and they also have the skills to learn about new words independently.

Nouns have lost their mystery and this is when students are moving into more esoteric areas of study, such as adjectives and adverbs—which is convenient, because adjectives and adverbs tend to be fun and engaging. You can use this worksheet which contains a combination of nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs for inspiration!

Build These Skills

Having a good vocabulary increases a person’s ability to be understood by others because it allows them to use more specific and precise words (compare “radish” vs “vegetable”). This specificity naturally improves your students’ quality of writing and, in a wonderful learning feedback loop, the act of writing is one of the best ways to develop vocabulary at a young age.

Vocabulary Building Activities to Try

• Silly Story Challenge: Assign 5–10 adjectives and verbs—students must use all in a short story. The sillier the better!
• Class Mad Libs: Give each student a word type for homework—collect their words, fill in blanks, and read the hilarious result aloud.
• Word Dissection Game: Choose a complex word (like photosynthesis) and have students guess its meaning by analyzing its parts.
• Weekend Word Hunt: Encourage students to find new words in stories, other subjects, or everyday life—make word-spotting a habit.
• Personal Word Lists: Have students keep a running list of new words, definitions, and fun facts—add to it weekly for a yearlong mini-project.

Recommended Read: Vocabulary Building Activities for Elementary Classrooms

Setting the Stage for Lifelong Writing Success

Learning how to brainstorm, organize, and conquer their writing assignments is a skill that your students will use for the rest of their lives—and their high school teachers will be so grateful that they’re already pros at this stuff!

Even though students won’t continue to use these specific worksheets as they progress through their academic career, they’ll still continue to use the skills they’ve learned from the worksheets with them whether they realize it or not.

For more lesson plans, worksheets and other helpful creative writing resources for your classroom, check out our online Teacher’s Lounge and be sure to sign up for your free classbook publishing kit!