Year 3 Curriculum – What Your Child Learns

Retrieval and inference deepen into early analysis of a writer's choices.

Retrieving and inferring meaning
Skills: Retrieving information, Making an inference, Making a prediction, Understanding vocabulary in context, Summarising a text, Sequencing events
Fiction analysis
Skills: Analysing a character, Analysing a setting, Identifying an author's choices
Text types
Skills: Distinguishing fact from opinion, Reading non-fiction, Reading poetry, Reading a play script
Using reference and context
Skills: Using a dictionary, Using context to understand a text

Structuring writing into paragraphs and using a genuine planning-drafting-editing process.

Paragraphs and planning
Skills: Organising writing into paragraphs, Planning a piece of writing, Drafting a piece of writing, Editing your own writing, Proofreading for errors
Writing for a purpose
Skills: Writing a narrative, Writing a description, Writing a recount, Writing instructions, Writing to persuade, Writing an information text, Writing a poem

A fuller set of word classes and the first real clause structures.

Word classes
Skills: Identifying nouns and pronouns, Identifying verbs, Identifying adjectives and adverbs, Identifying prepositions, Identifying conjunctions, Identifying determiners
Clauses and paragraphs
Skills: Organising ideas into paragraphs, Identifying a clause, Identifying a main clause, Identifying a subordinate clause, Using a fronted adverbial

Building toward direct speech with an introduction to inverted commas.

Sentence punctuation
Skills: Using full stops, Using commas, Using apostrophes, Introducing inverted commas, Using question marks, Using exclamation marks

Roots, prefixes and suffixes become central, alongside trickier spelling patterns.

Word-structure spelling
Skills: Spelling with prefixes, Spelling with suffixes, Building a word family, Introducing morphology, Introducing etymology
Tricky spelling
Skills: Distinguishing homophones, Recognising silent letters, Applying common spelling patterns

Everything your child learns in Year 3 English.