Year 3 English Plans

Using Fantastic Mr Fox by Roald Dahl, children familiarise themselves with features of narrative, finding examples from the book and through role play and hot-seating. Focus on direct speech and use the features and format they have seen to plan and write their own fantastic stories.

Become familiar with a range of Greek Myths, The Orchard Book of Greek Myths by Geraldine McCraughrean, Greek Myths by Marcia Williams. Use them to study powerful verbs, verb tenses, use of first and third person, paragraphs and ways of showing dialogue. Children draw story maps to learn a Greek Myth off by heart and to retell another myth in written form.

Explore Arthurian legends through Marcia Williams book King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. Read about The Sword in the Stone, Excalibur and The Round Table. Write a collaborative story, an imaginative recount and a story in the style of a comic book.

Explore The Day I Swapped my Dad for Two Goldfish by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean. Act out swap stories, learn about adverbials and recounts using past tense and first person and chronological order. Write a new version of The Diary of a Killer Cat, by Anne Fine, using recount features and complex sentences. The Hamilton Group Reader, The Diary of a Lively Labrador, is used to stretch more confident readers.

Read an online newspaper report about an amazing model of Hogwarts recently opened to the public. Children design a poster or leaflet to advertise it and look at school reports Hogwarts style. They collaborate to design a Hogwarts school prospectus, access to the Harry Potter Books by J K Rowling.

This fun filled busy plan will have the children learning about explanations and instructions in a practical way! After looking at the lovely story of The Ink Garden of Brother Theophane, they will make their own natural dyes and decorate illuminated letters, creating instructions along the way.

Explore the poems of Robert Louis Stevenson, (A Child’s Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson) and write a class poem using rhyming couplets. Revise verb tenses and learn about prepositions. Explore the poem Windy Nights and learn it by heart. Produce a class book containing poems written by the children.

Listen to a range of performance poems and explore the features that poets use, The Torch, The Deal and Don’t Tell Your Mother by Michael Rosen, Word of a Lie by Jackie Kay, Cool Cat by Mike Jubb, Picnic Time on the M25 by Paul Cookson, My Nephew by Wilf Merttens, The Dragon who Ate our School by Nick Toczek and Write-A-Rap Rap by Tony Mitton. Children identify and use conjunctions that indicate time and cause. Investigate negative prefixes, informal language and rhymes. Children write extra lines to one of poems and then a rap.

Using Michael Rosen’s A to Z, children will explore how poetry is used to express emotion. They will develop an understanding how poets carefully select adjectives, verbs and adverbs to evoke different emotions in the reader. They will know how to use speech punctuation accurately and will understand how to write consistently about the past, present and future. Children will experience performing poetry and using familiar poems as the model for their own writing.