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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:
  • use further prefixes and suffixes and understand how to add them (English Appendix 1)
  • spell further homophones
  • 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.