English
English National Curriculum for Year 3
Spoken language - Years 1 to 6
The children will be taught to:
- listen and respond appropriately to adults and their peers
- ask relevant questions to extend their understanding and knowledge
- use relevant strategies to build their vocabulary
- articulate and justify answers, arguments and opinions
- give well-structured descriptions, explanations and narratives for different purposes, including for expressing feelings
- maintain attention and participate actively in collaborative conversations, staying on topic and initiating and responding to comments
- use spoken language to develop understanding through speculating, hypothesising, imagining and exploring ideas
- speak audibly and fluently with an increasing command of Standard English
- participate in discussions, presentations, performances, role play, improvisations and debates
- gain, maintain and monitor the interest of the listener(s)
- consider and evaluate different viewpoints, attending to and building on the contributions of others
- select and use appropriate registers for effective communication.
Reading - word reading
The children will be taught to:
- apply their growing knowledge of root words, prefixes and suffixes (etymology and morphology) as listed in English Appendix 1 below, both to read aloud and to understand the meaning of new words they meet
- read further exception words, noting the unusual correspondences between spelling and sound, and where these occur in the word.
Reading - comprehension
The children will be taught to:
- develop positive attitudes to reading and understanding of what they read by:
- listening to and discussing a wide range of fiction, poetry, plays, non-fiction and reference books or textbooks
- reading books that are structured in different ways and reading for a range of purposes
- using dictionaries to check the meaning of words that they have read
- increasing their familiarity with a wide range of books, including fairy stories, myths and legends, and retelling some of these orally
- identifying themes and conventions in a wide range of books
- preparing poems and play scripts to read aloud and to perform, showing understanding through intonation, tone, volume and action
- discussing words and phrases that capture the reader’s interest and imagination
- recognising some different forms of poetry [for example, free verse, narrative poetry]
-
understand what they read, in books they can read independently, by:
- checking that the text makes sense to them, discussing their understanding and explaining the meaning of words in context
- asking questions to improve their understanding of a text
- drawing inferences such as inferring characters’ feelings, thoughts and motives from their actions, and justifying inferences with evidence
- predicting what might happen from details stated and implied
- identifying main ideas drawn from more than one paragraph and summarising these
- identifying how language, structure, and presentation contribute to meaning
- retrieve and record information from non-fiction
- participate in discussion about both books that are read to them and those they can read for themselves, taking turns and listening to what others say.
Writing - transcription
Spelling (see English Appendix 1 below)
The children will be be taught to:
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use further prefixes and suffixes and understand how to add them (English Appendix 1)
-
spell further homophones
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spell words that are often misspelt (English Appendix 1)
-
place the possessive apostrophe accurately in words with regular plurals [for example, girls’, boys’] and in words with irregular plurals [for example, children’s]
-
use the first two or three letters of a word to check its spelling in a dictionary
- write from memory simple sentences, dictated by the teacher, that include words and punctuation taught so far.
Handwriting
The children will be taught to:
- use the diagonal and horizontal strokes that are needed to join letters and understand which letters, when adjacent to one another, are best left unjoined
- increase the legibility, consistency and quality of their handwriting [for example, by ensuring that the downstrokes of letters are parallel and equidistant; that lines of writing are spaced sufficiently so that the ascenders and descenders of letters do not touch].
Writing - composition
The children will be taught to:
- plan their writing by:
- discussing writing similar to that which they are planning to write in order to understand and learn from its structure, vocabulary and grammar
- discussing and recording ideas
- draft and write by:
- composing and rehearsing sentences orally (including dialogue), progressively building a varied and rich vocabulary and an increasing range of sentence structures (English Appendix 2 below)
- organising paragraphs around a theme
- in narratives, creating settings, characters and plot
- in non-narrative material, using simple organisational devices [for example, headings and sub-headings]
- evaluate and edit by:
- assessing the effectiveness of their own and others’ writing and suggesting improvements
- proposing changes to grammar and vocabulary to improve consistency, including the accurate use of pronouns in sentences
- proof-read for spelling and punctuation errors
- read aloud their own writing, to a group or the whole class, using appropriate intonation and controlling the tone and volume so that the meaning is clear.
Writing - vocabulary, punctuation and grammar
The children will be taught to:
- develop their understanding of the concepts set out in English Appendix 2 by:
- extending the range of sentences with more than one clause by using a wider range of conjunctions, including when, if, because, although
- using the present perfect form of verbs in contrast to the past tense
- choosing nouns or pronouns appropriately for clarity and cohesion and to avoid repetition
- using conjunctions, adverbs and prepositions to express time and cause
- using fronted adverbials
- learning the grammar for years 3 and 4 in English Appendix 2
- indicate grammatical and other features by:
- using commas after fronted adverbials
- indicating possession by using the possessive apostrophe with plural nouns
- using and punctuating direct speech
- use and understand the grammatical terminology in English Appendix 2 accurately and appropriately when discussing their writing and reading.