No, they don’t need all the times tables yet.

Grade 3 does NOT require all the times tables. The expectation is recall of the 2s, 5s and 10s only, plus the related division facts. Facts for 1 × 1 through 10 × 10 are a Grade 4 expectation.

Grade 3 does work with multiplication up to 10 × 10 and division up to 100 ÷ 10 using arrays, drawings and tools (B2.6) — but that is about representing and reasoning, not instant recall. If a well-meaning relative is drilling all twelve tables in September, they are working a year ahead, and the cost is usually enjoyment.

Nine specific expectations sit under E2 in Grade 3 — more than any other section of the mathematics curriculum at this level. If your child finds one term of maths harder than the others, this is usually the one.

It is a snapshot of a system, not a verdict on a child. It is worth knowing it is coming, and worth not making it a source of anxiety. The best preparation is the ordinary work of the year — the reading, the number facts, the writing your child is doing anyway. Nothing in this guide should be done because of EQAO.

What Grade 3 sets up. Grade 4 is the biggest single step in Ontario elementary school: all the times tables arrive, decimals arrive, formal fraction notation arrives, puberty enters the Health curriculum, and Core French becomes compulsory. What a child can do by June of Grade 3 largely determines how Grade 4 feels.

Why this matters in Grade 3. This is the year many children first decide whether they are “a maths person.” The curriculum explicitly asks that they come to recognise that testing out different approaches and learning from mistakes is an important part of the learning process. If your child says “I’m bad at maths” in Grade 3, that is a curriculum-relevant problem, not just a feelings problem.

There is no B1.8 in Grade 3. Number Sense runs B1.1 to B1.7. Comparing and ordering unit fractions is B1.8 in Grade 1 — a prerequisite for this year’s work, not part of it. Teach it if it isn’t secure, but don’t cite a Grade 3 code for it.

This is the expectation to be precise about. Twos, fives and tens. Not all tables. Related division facts means 10 ÷ 2, 20 ÷ 5, and so on — because knowing 5 × 4 = 20 should immediately give you 20 ÷ 5 = 4.

This is where fractions start being written properly. Three fourths means ¼ + ¼ + ¼. The numerator counts how many unit fractions you have. That single idea makes fraction addition obvious later, and skipping it is why so many older children add denominators.

The Grade 3 shift: patterns can now be built from operations, not just shapes. “Start at 4 and add 6 each time” is a Grade 3 pattern. “Multiply by 2 each time” is a Grade 3 pattern. The rule is an instruction, not a picture.

Repeating events means loops. “Repeat 4 times: forward 5, turn right” instead of writing eight instructions. This is genuinely powerful and children usually love it — it’s the first time code feels shorter than doing it by hand.

Grade 3 geometry is three-dimensional. Grade 2 sorted flat shapes; Grade 3 builds solids and counts their parts. The vocabulary that matters: face (a flat surface), edge (where two faces meet), vertex (a corner where edges meet — plural vertices).

Telling the time is a Grade 3 expectation, not a Grade 2 one. If your child couldn’t read a clock face last year, that was correct. This year it’s on the list — in hours, minutes and seconds, on analog and digital.

This is the whole strand — one expectation. But it’s a good one, and it’s genuinely useful. The method to teach is counting up, which is what people behind tills actually do: something costs 75¢ and you pay a dollar, so 75 → 80 → 90 → 100, which is 25¢ change. Counting up is far more reliable at eight than column subtraction.

Next year this strand grows to five expectations and the overall expectation itself changes — from understanding currency to making informed financial decisions, covering spending, saving, earning, investing and donating. Grade 3 is the last light year.

Strand A is woven through the other three rather than taught separately. But A3.3 is a substantive expectation with real content, and it should be met with authentic texts by Indigenous authors rather than a single themed week.

A note on numbering. Grade 3 has five B2 expectations — phonics, orthography, morphology, vocabulary and fluency. In Grade 4 the first three are consolidated into a single B2.1, which pushes vocabulary to B2.2 and fluency to B2.3. So a code that means orthographic knowledge this year means vocabulary next year. Worth knowing before a parent–teacher interview.

The word that matters in B2.2 is “consolidated.” In Grade 2 orthographic knowledge was developing; in Grade 3 it should be settled and automatic. Position-based tendencies means knowing that -ay goes at the end of a word and ai- in the middle, that -ck never starts a word, that -tch follows a short vowel but -ch follows a consonant or long vowel.

The centre of gravity moves from phonics to morphology. In Grade 1 and 2, the main tool for an unknown word was sounding it out. In Grade 3, the main tool becomes breaking it into meaningful parts. Unhelpfully is not decoded letter by letter — it’s read as un + help + ful + ly, and its meaning is assembled from those pieces.

Fluency is the bridge between decoding and comprehension, and Grade 3 is where it should become automatic. A child who reads accurately but slowly is not a comprehension problem — they are an automaticity problem, and the fix is repeated reading of the same short passage, not more reading of new passages.

The Grade 3 sentence jump is the complex sentence — a sentence with a main clause and a subordinate clause, joined by words like because, although, when, while, if, since. Children usually acquire these in speech long before writing, so the task is often getting what they can already say onto the page.

Inference is the centre of Grade 3 comprehension. Grade 2 answered questions whose answers were in the text. Grade 3 is expected to combine what the text says with what they already know to work out what it doesn’t say. The question that builds this is not “what happened?” but “which words made you think that?” — evidence, every time.

C3.1 literary devices at Grade 3 means metaphor and assonance — recognising them, naming them, and eventually using them. They build on rhyme, alliteration and onomatopoeia (Grade 1) and consonance and simile (Grade 2); personification arrives in Grade 4 and idioms in Grade 6. For a child who takes language literally, metaphor is best taught explicitly as a system: here is what the words say, here is what people mean, and the two are different on purpose. That’s not a workaround; it’s the accurate explanation.

The Grade 3 writing shift is deeper revision and fuller editing. Grade 2 introduced revising with feedback from others — adding or deleting sentences (D2.5). Grade 3 revises to improve content and clarity, replacing words and adding sentences, and D2.6 grows into full editing for spelling, punctuation, grammar and text conventions, with proofreading. These are different activities and worth naming differently: revising is improving what it says; editing is fixing how it’s written.

Three distinct processes, not one. A1.1 research (find out what’s known), A1.2 experimentation (test a question fairly), A1.3 engineering design (build something to solve a problem). They are different, and Grade 3 should be able to tell them apart. The engineering one always includes testing and improving — a first attempt that fails is the process working.

A2.1’s phrase “testing, debugging, and refining” matters. Debugging is not a mistake to be avoided; it is the named skill.

Photosynthesis in Grade 3 is a real expectation, named explicitly — including the gas exchange. It doesn’t need to be biochemistry: plants use sunlight, water and a gas from the air to make their own food, and they give off the gas we breathe. That’s enough, and it’s accurate.

Stamen and pistil are named in the curriculum. Grade 3 is expected to know the reproductive parts of a flower by name. A real flower and a magnifying glass do this in five minutes — lilies are ideal because the parts are large.

The key new idea is contact versus non-contact. A push, a pull, friction and air resistance need touching. Gravity and magnetism act at a distance — and that genuinely surprises children, because everything else they’ve met requires contact. Drop something and ask “what touched it?”

C1.2 is the safety-device expectation and it’s a good one: helmets, seatbelts, airbags, crash barriers, knee pads, hard hats. All of them work by spreading a force out over more time or more area. Ask how each one helps, not just whether it does.

Strength and stability are different things, and this is the distinction to nail. A structure is strong if it can hold a heavy load. It is stable if it doesn’t fall over. A tall thin tower can be strong and unstable; a beanbag is stable and not strong. Ask both questions separately about everything you build.

Struts and ties (D2.7) are the most specific expectation in the strand. A strut is pushed — squashed — and resists compression (a table leg, a tent pole). A tie is pulled — stretched — and resists tension (a guy rope, a bridge cable, the string on a kite). Push and pull on a cardboard triangle and you can feel which is which.

Soil is not dirt, and that’s the whole strand in one sentence. Healthy soil is alive — it contains worms, insects, fungi, bacteria and decaying plant matter, as well as sand, silt, clay, water and air. The living components are the part children don’t expect.

E2.3 is specifically about Ontario. Different soils suit different crops, and Ontario has real variety — the clay plains of the southwest, the sandy soils of Norfolk County, the shallow soils over the Canadian Shield. This connects directly to Social Studies Strand B, which is almost certainly deliberate.

The framing that matters. This period is often taught as a settlement story. The curriculum explicitly requires multiple perspectives, and asks students to consider what these events meant for the people already living here. “Whose story is this, and who is telling it?” is an eight-year-old-appropriate question, and the curriculum wants it asked.

Continuity and change is the core concept. Some things about 1800 are unrecognisable — no electricity, no plumbing, children working. Some things are identical — families eating together, children playing, people wanting their community to be safe. Sorting daily life into changed and stayed the same is the central intellectual task.

The through-line is that geography explains economy. Farms are where the soil is good. Mines are where the ore is. Cities grew where rivers met, or where a railway crossed, or where a harbour was. Ontario’s wine region exists because of the specific microclimate near the lake. Every “why is this here?” has a physical answer.

This connects to Science Strand E. Soil type determining what crops grow is simultaneously a Science expectation (E2.3) and the foundation of this Social Studies strand. Teaching them together is more efficient and more honest.

This is mental health literacy, taught deliberately. By Grade 3 the expectation is not just naming feelings but starting to manage them — noticing what a feeling is, noticing what triggers it, and having strategies. Children who find emotional vocabulary hard benefit enormously from a written list to point at, and from having the strategies chosen and written down in advance, on a calm day.

Enjoyment is an actual expectation, not a nicety. The curriculum wants children to find activities they like, on the reasonable theory that those are the ones they’ll still be doing at forty. If your child dislikes team sports, that is not a failure to meet the expectation — it’s a prompt to find the swimming, climbing, dancing or cycling that works instead.

B2 in Grade 3 starts to include noticing the body’s responses deliberately — faster heartbeat, quicker breathing, warmth, sweating, muscle fatigue — and understanding these as signs of a body working properly, not signs of something wrong.

The Grade 3 progression is toward combining and sequencing movements smoothly and applying skills in situations where conditions change — a moving target, a partner, a game with rules. Grade 2 combined two movements; Grade 3 links them into sequences and adapts them under pressure.

C2 is the intellectually interesting one. Naming tactics explicitly — move into open space, send it away from the defender, watch where it’s going rather than where it is, communicate with your team — turns games from something you’re expected to intuit into a set of rules you can follow. For children who find the unwritten social rules of playground games opaque, this is genuinely levelling.

Puberty content begins in Grade 4, not Grade 3. If you are wondering what your child will be taught this year on this topic, it is healthy relationships, boundaries and consent, what affects growing up, and respect for visible and invisible differences. Next year brings the physical changes of puberty (Grade 4’s D1.5) and the hygiene that goes with them (D2.4).

In Canada, Kids Help Phone is free and available at any hour: 1-800-668-6868, or text CONNECT to 686868. Worth knowing yourself; worth your child knowing when they’re a bit older.

The order is the point. Describing before judging is what makes the judgement worth anything. And “it makes me feel nothing much” is a legitimate answer at step 4 — not every artwork has to move you.

The progression is worth knowing so you can see where your child is: Grade 1 contrast → Grade 2 repetition and rhythm → Grade 3 variety → Grade 4 emphasis → Grade 5 proportion → Grade 6 balance → Grade 7 unity and harmony → Grade 8 movement. The 2009 Arts document names the focus for each grade in so many words, so this sequence is taken from it rather than inferred.

Rounds are the Grade 3 milestone. Singing Row, Row, Row Your Boat in two parts is genuinely difficult and genuinely thrilling, because you have to hold your own line while hearing a different one. It’s also the first experience of harmony as something you make rather than something you hear.

Tension is what Grade 3 deepens, and it is the most useful dramatic idea there is. The element runs from Grade 1, but Grades 1 and 2 only ask children to be aware of a mystery or a problem to be solved; Grade 3 asks them to identify the factors that create it. A scene where nothing is at stake is boring. Ask “what does this character want, and what’s stopping them?” and a scene appears.

Tableau remains the gentlest entry point — a frozen picture made with bodies, no improvising and no talking. For a child who finds performing difficult, posing figures or toys instead is a legitimate way in and covers the same expectations.

If your child is being drilled on any of the above, someone is working a year ahead. That is not automatically harmful, but the usual cost is enjoyment — and enjoyment is the thing that keeps a child going in Grade 7.

Level 3 is the goal. It means your child is meeting the expectations for their grade, fully. It is a good result. Level 4 is not “the target” — it indicates unusual depth, and chasing it is usually counterproductive.

Level 4 is not the same as “more work” or “harder numbers.” It’s characterised by depth of understanding, transfer to unfamiliar situations, and the quality of reasoning. A child who can explain why a strategy works, or who spots that a question has two possible answers, is demonstrating Level 4 thinking regardless of how many questions they finished.

Grade 3 is an EQAO year. The provincial assessment in reading, writing and mathematics is administered in the spring. It is a snapshot of a system, not a verdict on a child. It’s worth knowing it’s coming, and worth not making it a source of anxiety — the best preparation is the ordinary work of the year.