The Texas Educational Assessment of Minimum Skills (TEAMS) was developed by the Texas Education Agency (TEA), in response to Texas House Bill 72 (1984), which mandated a new basic skills assessment program for mathematics, reading, and writing at grades 1, 3, 5, 7, 9 and 11. This is one in a series of Instructional Strategies Guides designed to familiarize Texas educators with the types of strategies employed in assessing learner mastery of TEAMS objectives and to provide suggested instructional activities that can be used to promote mastery of those objectives. This guide focuses on the TEAMS reading objectives for grade 3. It provides detailed description of the test items used to measure each reading objective. The nine objectives are subsumed under six skill areas: (1) main idea; (2) word meaning (sight words, contextual analysis, structural analysis); (3) word decoding (phonic analysis); (4) detail (specifics, sequence); (5) inference (predicting future outcomes); and (6) reference usage (using a table of content). The following information is provided for each objective: (1) description of objective; (2) sample item; (3) test questions; (4) answer choices; (5) answer analysis for sample item; (6) instructional emphases; and (7) possible instructional activities. (JAZ)