A full third-grade English Language Arts practice test, aligned to the Smarter Balanced Assessment your child takes every year. Read it the way they have to take it — all of it, at once, with no context.
Before your child opens this test
By third grade, roughly 3,000 hours of reading and writing instruction have already been delivered — phonics, grammar, vocabulary, comprehension, spelling, writing prompts, leveled readers. Three years of daily work.
Then this test asks an 8 or 9-year-old to identify theme, infer character motivation from ambiguous adult behavior, interpret figurative language, understand author's purpose, and write a defended opinion paragraph with evidence — all on a 60-minute clock.
Read what follows the way your child has to take it.
Maya had been watching the door at the back of Mr. Reyes's yard all summer. It was made of old wood, painted a fading blue, and vines had wound their way through its iron latch. Maya knew she wasn't supposed to go through it — her mother had said so clearly — but she had always wondered what was on the other side.
One afternoon, as she helped Mr. Reyes carry groceries from his car, she finally asked.
"What's behind the blue door?"
Mr. Reyes set down his bag and looked at her with an expression she couldn't quite read. It wasn't surprise. It was more like he had been expecting the question for a long time.
"Come," he said.
He led her to the door and lifted the latch. The hinges groaned, and Maya held her breath. On the other side was a garden — but not a typical one. The plants grew in crooked rows, some nearly as tall as Maya herself. Stones lined each path, painted with names in a language she didn't recognize.
"My wife planted this," Mr. Reyes said quietly. "Every stone has the name of someone she missed."
Maya looked at the stones differently now. They weren't just decorations. They were memories.
"Can I come back?" she asked.
Mr. Reyes looked at the garden, then at Maya. "I think," he said slowly, "she would have liked that."
Maya didn't know who "she" was yet, but she understood what it meant to be welcomed somewhere that mattered.
Every fall, millions of monarch butterflies begin one of the most remarkable journeys in the natural world. They travel from Canada and the northern United States all the way to mountain forests in central Mexico — a trip of up to 3,000 miles. What makes this even more extraordinary is that the butterflies making the trip have never been to Mexico before.
Scientists have studied monarchs for decades trying to understand how they navigate. Unlike birds, monarchs do not learn the route from older members of the group. Instead, they appear to use a combination of the sun's position and an internal sense of time to find their direction. Some researchers also believe monarchs can sense Earth's magnetic field, though this is still being investigated.
The monarch's journey is not just long — it is also dangerous. Storms, habitat loss, and a shortage of milkweed (the only plant monarch caterpillars can eat) have caused monarch populations to decline sharply. In 2022, the International Union for Conservation of Nature officially listed the migratory monarch butterfly as an endangered species.
Once monarchs arrive in Mexico, they cluster by the millions in fir trees, forming enormous orange and black clouds. They remain there through the winter, living off stored fat. When spring arrives, they begin moving north — though it will take several generations of butterflies to complete the return journey.
The monarchs that eventually arrive back in the northern United States are the great-great-grandchildren of the ones that flew south.