EOG / Common Core Vocabulary 3rd Grade

Genre - type of story / passage

Fiction - story that is not true or real
Nonfiction - story that is real and filled with facts
Fable - a fiction story that teaches a lesson or moral and usually the characters are from nature.
(animals, plans, son, moon)
Folktale - a story that has been passed down by word of mouth for generations.
Myth - a fiction story that tells how animals, nature, or humans came to be - in an exaggerated
and creative way
Fairy Tale - a fiction story that includes magic, talking animals, and prince and princesses
Tall Tale - a very exaggerated fiction story that has larger than life characters that do impossible
things
Biography - a nonfiction story that is written about someones life
Autobiography - a nonfiction story that someone has written about their own life.
Moral - lesson that the story was written to teach
Article - a short passage usually written about a person, something in science or an event in
history
Character - a person, animal, or object in the story
Character Trait - A specific quality or feature of a character. (example: friendly, evil, sneaky,
athletic)
Physical Trait - The way a character looks
Sequence of Events - the order that something happens in a passage or story
Motivation - a personal goal that a character sets to reach based on a reward they want
Simile - compares two unlike things using the words like or as (The boy ran as fast as a rabbit.)
Metaphor - compares two unlike things without using the words like or as

Personification - giving human actions or traits to a non-human thing

Text or Narrative or Passage - story
Exaggeration - stretching the truth - a lie to make something seem better or worse than what it
really is.
Moral - lesson the story is written to teach you
Poetry - a genre with elements of rhyme, rhythm, and figurative language. The text will often
look different because it will not go all the way across the page. (It may not always rhyme.)
Stanza - a group of words separated by spaces in a poem (a paragraph in a poem)
Narrator - the person who is telling the story
Point of View - the opinion of the author, narrator, or reader of the story - Feelings about an idea
in the story
Illustration - a drawing in the story
Mood - the feeling or emotion of a passage or story
Setting - when and where a story takes place
Compare - tell how 2 or more things are alike or similar
Contrast - tell how 2 or more things are different
Theme - the main idea or message of a story or passage
Central Message - the lesson or idea a passage is trying to teach you, main idea in a non-fiction
text
Main Idea - what the story is mainly about
Key Details - details from the passage that support, or back up, the main idea
Plot - the events that happen in the beginning, middle, and end of a story
Comprehension - to understand and keep the information you read in your memory
Cause - the reason an events happens

Effect - the event that happened

Text Features - Parts of a nonfiction text that identify parts of the passage (illustrations,
graphics, text boxes, sidebars, title, subtitle..)
Title - The name of a text or passage
Subtitle - a title within a passage that tells the main idea of a selection or part of a passage
Italics - words that are written in a slant - also used to identify book titles (italics)
Parenthesis - a text feature used for extra information included in a sentence (

Graph - a graphic organizer that gives extra information - has to do with numbers or a count of
something in the passage.
Description - an explanation of how something or someone looks or acts
Map - A visual image of a place in the world that you can use to find a certain place or directions
Graphic Organizer - a visual (way to see) way of organizing information (chart, time line, flow
chart, bubble map, venn diagram)
Timeline - a visual to show events from a passage in the time order that they happen
Diagram - a picture that explains an idea or object within a text with labels to identify parts
Table - information shown in rows and columns
Caption - words that explain a illustration, photograph, or graphic organizer and it is usualyl
found below the object it is describing
Bold - words written in dark print (bold)
Sidebar - a short articles usually alongside of a larger article - sometimes can be found below
the article in separate box.
Identify - to find and name or label parts, or to find something specific in a passage or story
Prefix - letters that are added to the beginning of the word to change the meaning - (re, in, pre,
un, non)
Suffix - letter that are added to the end of a word to change the words meaning