English

English

“There is more treasure in books than in all the pirate’s loot on Treasure Island.” – Walt Disney

In Year 3, we aim to instil children with a life-long love writing by carefully planning engaging lessons that are linked to our termly project focus. Our daily English lessons are usually taught around a class book or by genre, for example, character descriptions or non-chronological reports. The children also have a daily reading lesson which exposes them to a range of high-quality, engaging texts and develops their comprehension skills. 

Writing

By the end of Year 3, we would expect children to be able to:

• begin to use ideas from own reading and modelled examples to plan their writing
•  demonstrate an increasing understanding of purpose and audience
•  begin to use the structure of a wider range of text types (including the use of simple layout devices in non-fiction)
•  proof-read their own and others’ work to check for errors with increasing accuracy, and make improvements
• make deliberate ambitious word choices to add detail
•  begin to create settings, characters and plot in narratives
•  begin to organise their writing into paragraphs around a theme
• maintain the correct tense (including present perfect tense) throughout a piece of writing
• use inverted commas in direct speech
• use subordinate clauses
• begin to use conjunctions, adverbs and prepositions to show time, place and cause.
• use ‘a’ or ‘an’ correctly most of the time
• spell many words with prefixes correctly, e.g. irrelevant, autograph, incorrect, disobey, superstar, antisocial
•  spell many words with suffixes correctly, e.g. usually, poisonous, adoration
•  begin to spell homophones correctly, e.g. which and witch
•  spell some of the Year 3 and 4 statutory spelling words correctly
• use a neat, joined handwriting style with increasing accuracy.

This term, the children will be learning different genres of writing, starting with a newspaper report.

The first lesson started with an exciting discovery! The children found a mystery chest that had been dug up by the builders. We took part in some hot-seating to imagine we were the person who had buried the treasure chest and imagined what we had left inside.

Come back to see our finished newspaper reports!

Reading

During Year 3, we will read, listen to and discuss a range of different types of texts including: fiction, poetry, plays non-fiction and textbooks. We will build on the skills and knowledge that we learnt in Key Stage One by making sensible predictions, thinking about the author's choice of language and using the text to draw inferences on characters' feelings, thoughts and motives, as well as other aspects of reading.