English

Home Learning Activities - Year 3

These notes have been created for schools to share with parents and carers of children in Years 3 and 4, as part of home learning, to allow children to develop their own responses to Power of Reading texts they may have studied or will be studying in school.

Each set of notes contains five simple activities designed to develop children’s comprehension skills and strategies and develop their imagination and creativity for writing, linked to the National Curriculum.

Most activities are reading, talk and writing based and need little more than a pencil and paper to complete. Other drawing materials such as coloured pencils or felt tips would be useful, but are not essential. You may wish to provide each child with a home learning journal - a blank exercise book - to complete tasks in. 

Children don’t have to have a copy of the book at home to do the activities, as extracts are provided, but it might inspire parents to want to buy the book if they can afford to, or borrow from the school or library, if their child enjoyed the extract and activities.

The five key areas covered in the activities are:

• Explore it: Reading of text and/or illustrations and questions to develop children's awareness of language and vocabulary, including how this can be used for effect.
• Illustrate it: Drawing tasks to develop children's visualisation skills - a key aspect of comprehension.
• Talk about it: Questions or talking points to support children's understanding of key parts of the text, encouraging them to refer back to the text to support their ideas.
• Imagine it: Talking points and questions that encourage deeper responses to texts, thinking beyond the text and linking to real life knowledge and understanding.
• Create it: A range of different ideas for writing in response to a text, developing children's imagination and creative ideas.