Free Grade 3 English Worksheets for Virginia Students (SOL-Aligned)

Virginia is a little different from most of the country when it comes to English standards, and parents notice this pretty quickly when they go looking for practice. The state never adopted Common Core. It uses its own framework — the Standards of Learning, usually just called the SOL — and has done so since well before CCSS existed. For Grade 3 reading and writing, the SOL covers most of the same skills you’d see in other states, but the wording, the emphasis, and a few of the smaller substandards are Virginia’s own.

That’s why this page is built specifically for the Virginia SOL list. Each worksheet below is mapped to a Grade 3 English SOL — not generic third-grade ELA, but the specific skills the state asks Virginia kids to demonstrate. There are 53 worksheets here instead of the 59 you might see for Common Core states, because a handful of standards (like the optional research project pieces) don’t appear explicitly in the SOL. Everything that *is* in the SOL is here.

All of it is free. No login, no email, no premium tier. Click the title, the PDF opens, you can print as many copies as you want and use them in whatever setting fits.

What you’ll find

Virginia’s SOL frames Grade 3 English around a few clear pillars: reading and understanding, writing for a purpose, building vocabulary, and using language correctly. The list below mirrors that. Each PDF is one skill, with a brief refresher at the top, a passage or task in the middle, and an answer key on the last page that explains its reasoning.

Reading: Literature

• Central Message, Lesson, or Moral — figure out the lesson a story teaches
• Describing Characters in a Story — traits, feelings, motivations
• Literal and Nonliteral Language — the difference between what words say and what they mean
• Parts of Stories, Dramas, and Poems — chapters, scenes, stanzas
• Point of View in Stories — who’s telling the story
• Illustrations in Stories — reading the pictures alongside the words
• Comparing Stories — two stories side by side

Reading: Nonfiction

• Text Evidence in Nonfiction — back up answers with the article itself
• Main Idea and Key Details — what the passage is mostly about, and the facts that support it
• Sequence, Steps, and Cause & Effect — first, next, because, so
• Vocabulary in Nonfiction — the topic-specific words in science and social-studies texts
• Text Features in Nonfiction — headings, sidebars, captions
• Author’s Point of View in Nonfiction — what the writer thinks vs. plain facts
• Using Maps, Photos, and Diagrams — the picture is doing some of the work
• Logical Connections in Nonfiction — how paragraphs connect
• Comparing Two Texts on the Same Topic — two articles, same topic, different angles

Foundational Reading Skills

• Prefixes and Suffixes — word parts that change meaning
• Words with Latin Suffixes — -tion, -sion, -able
• Decoding Multisyllable Words — break the long ones into pieces
• Irregularly Spelled Words (Sight Words) — the tricky words that just have to be memorized
• Reading Fluency: Rate and Expression — read aloud so it sounds like talking
• Self-Correcting While You Read — fix it when the sentence stops making sense

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Writing

• Opinion Writing — say what you think and back it up
• Informative/Explanatory Writing — teach someone something they didn’t know
• Narrative Writing — tell a story in order, with details
• Organizing Writing for Task and Purpose — different writing for different jobs
• Editing and Revising — make a draft better, one pass at a time
• Gathering Information and Taking Notes — write down what you find, not everything you see

Grammar

• Parts of Speech — nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs
• Regular and Irregular Plural Nouns — tables; geese; children
• Abstract Nouns — words for ideas and feelings
• Regular and Irregular Verbs — walked vs. went
• Simple Verb Tenses — past, present, future
• Subject–Verb and Pronoun–Antecedent Agreement — the dog barks; the dogs bark
• Comparative and Superlative Adjectives and Adverbs — fast, faster, fastest
• Coordinating and Subordinating Conjunctions — and, but, because, when
• Simple, Compound, and Complex Sentences — all three sentence types

Capitalization, Punctuation, and Spelling

• Capitalizing Words in Titles — title-case rules
• Commas in Addresses and Dates — where the commas go
• Commas and Quotation Marks in Dialogue — punctuating what characters say
• Possessives — showing that something belongs
• Conventional Spelling — common words you’ll spell often
• Spelling Patterns and Generalizations — the rules behind the spellings
• Using Reference Materials to Check Spelling — look it up to confirm

Vocabulary and Word Study

• Spoken vs. Written English — casual vs. formal
• Context Clues — use surrounding words to find meaning
• Affixes for Vocabulary — use word parts to figure out meaning
• Root Words — the base word inside a longer one
• Using Glossaries and Beginning Dictionaries — look up words to confirm meaning
• Figurative Language: Similes, Metaphors, and Idioms — read figurative phrases with confidence
• Real-Life Word Connections — connect words to real situations
• Shades of Meaning — tell apart words with similar meanings
• Academic and Domain-Specific Vocabulary — Grade 3 academic words

How to actually use them

A worksheet on its own won’t fix a struggling reader. A worksheet plus a five-minute conversation about it, repeated week after week, slowly will. A few practical pointers.

Use the review box at the top. Each PDF opens with a small refresher of the skill and a worked example. Skipping it is the most common parent mistake. Reading it together, out loud, is usually two minutes that saves ten.

Choose one. Resist printing six. A single worksheet done thoughtfully beats a packet done mechanically. Always.

Hand it over and step away. The first solo attempt is the most informative one — even if the answers come out wrong.

Go through the answer key together. The explanations on the last page are the lesson, again. Reading them aloud after a wrong answer is where the worksheet earns its keep.

Wait a week before repeating a skill. Spaced practice is uncomfortable for parents — it looks like nothing’s happening — but it builds memory better than back-to-back drilling.

A note on the Virginia SOL test

The Grade 3 Reading SOL is given in spring, and the writing standards are woven into the broader English SOL. Virginia’s standards are slightly more granular in some places than other states’ frameworks, and a little less granular in others. The practical effect: if your kid is solid on Main Idea and Key Details, Word Reference Materials, Context Clues, and Reading Comprehension Strategies (which on this page lives across pages like Self-Correcting, Logical Connections, and Comparing Two Texts), they’re in good shape going into the test.

If you want a short focused list for the few weeks leading up to the SOL, start with Main Idea and Key Details, Context Clues, and Figurative Language. The first two are heavy-hitters on every Reading SOL release I’ve ever seen, and the third one is the place where careful readers and quick readers often diverge in their scores.

Why aren’t there 59 worksheets like other states?

You may notice if you’ve looked at sibling pages on this site for other states that some have a slightly longer list. Virginia uses the SOL framework, not Common Core, and a few CCSS substandards don’t appear explicitly in the Virginia SOL — short research projects and a couple of the more granular speaking/listening standards, for example. Rather than pad the list with pages that don’t actually match what the SOL asks of Grade 3 kids, we kept this page focused on the 53 skills the SOL explicitly covers. Cleaner alignment, no filler.

Questions Virginia families ask

Are these worksheets aligned with the Virginia SOL? Yes. Every worksheet on this page maps to a Grade 3 SOL skill in English. The list is built to mirror the SOL, not Common Core.

Can I use these for homeschool? Yes — the answer keys are written for a student to read independently, with explanations rather than just letter answers.

What about strong readers? Try Comparing Stories, Comparing Two Texts on the Same Topic, and Author’s Point of View in Nonfiction. They stretch confident kids in a way that’s still age-appropriate.

What about a kid who’s behind? Decoding Multisyllable Words, Sight Words, and Prefixes and Suffixes are the best places to start. Fluency improvements show up faster than parents expect.

Last note

Virginia’s standards have been around for a long time. They’re stable, they’re well-known to teachers, and they’re not chasing the latest trend in ELA pedagogy. Practice that takes them seriously will serve your kid well — both for the SOL and for fourth grade, which arrives faster than you think. Print a worksheet tonight, leave the rest for later, and come back whenever you need the next one.

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