Key Stage 2 · Year 3 · ages 7 or 8
Year 3: topics explained for parents
Year 3 is the first year of Key Stage 2, with bigger numbers, longer writing and more science. Children work with three-digit numbers, learn the 3, 4 and 8 times tables, and use paragraphs and inverted commas for speech. Science covers rocks and fossils, light and shadows, and forces and magnets.
English
- Drafting sentences, paragraphs and stories
- Editing, proofreading and reading aloud
- Planning by learning from model texts
- Joined handwriting and legibility
- Performing poems and plays
- Inference, questioning and prediction
- Main ideas and non-fiction
- Reading widely, myths and legends
- Plural apostrophes, dictionaries and dictation
- Prefixes, y and ou spellings
- Endings -tion, -sion, -cian, -ous, -sure
- Greek, French and Latin spellings; ei, eigh, ey
- Plural apostrophes and homophones
- Spelling words: accident to difficult
- Spelling words: disappear to important
- Spelling words: interest to potatoes
- Spelling words: pressure to woman
- Suffixes, –ation and –ly
- Prefixes, suffixes and homophones
- Explaining and justifying ideas
- Presenting, performing and debating
- Listening, questioning and group talk
- Direct speech, commas and apostrophes
- Conjunctions, present perfect, fronted adverbials
- Reading new words from their parts
- Time, place and cause
- Paragraphs, headings and the present perfect
- Speech marks and direct speech
- Prefixes, a or an, and word families
Maths
Science
Subjects taught across Key Stage 2
These subjects are planned across the whole key stage, so schools choose when in it each topic comes.