Grade 3
Grade 3 English Tutoring
Live online Grade 3 English in groups of four: myths and playscripts, direct speech and speech marks, apostrophes, prefixes and suffixes, and writing a recount.
The short answer
Grade 3 English is where punctuation gets complicated. The year covers prefixes, suffixes and homophones, myths, legends and playscripts, apostrophes for contractions, speech marks and direct speech, multi-clause sentences with time and cause connectives, irregular past tense verbs, prepositions, and writing letters, instructions and recounts.
What we cover in Grade 3 English
- Spelling: prefixes, suffixes and homophones
- Reading myths, legends and adventure stories
- Playscripts and reading aloud
- Apostrophes for contractions
- Speech marks and direct speech
- Multi-clause sentences with connectives of time and cause
- Regular and irregular past tense verbs
- Prepositions
- Writing letters, instructions and recounts
- Poems from different cultures
By the end of the year
- Read a longer story independently and describe what a character is like, using evidence from the text.
- Punctuate direct speech with speech marks and use apostrophes correctly in shortened forms.
- Write a well-organised recount or set of instructions with a clear beginning, middle and end.
Where students get stuck
- Apostrophes sprayed onto plurals — 'banana's' — instead of being reserved for contractions and possession.
- Over-regularised irregular past tenses: 'goed', 'catched' and 'runned'.
Punctuating what people say
Direct speech is the hardest punctuation a primary student meets, because it needs four decisions at once — where the speech starts, where it ends, what goes inside the closing mark, and where the new line begins when someone else speaks.
Playscripts are the useful bridge, and they are on the syllabus for that reason. A script separates the speaker from the words with no punctuation at all, so a student can convert a scene they already understand into speech marks rather than inventing both at the same time.
Apostrophes are not a plural signal
Grade 3 introduces the apostrophe for contractions, and within a fortnight it starts appearing on every word ending in s. Signs in shops do the same thing, so the child is not inventing the error from nothing.
The rule that holds is a test rather than a list: an apostrophe stands in for missing letters. If nothing has been removed, nothing is missing, and the apostrophe has no work to do. Possession is taught later in the year, once the contraction test is secure.
Goed, catched and runned
These are a good sign, oddly. A child saying 'goed' has worked out that past tense takes -ed and is applying it consistently — the rule is right and English is the problem.
So we treat irregular verbs as vocabulary rather than as grammar errors. They have to be met, used and remembered one at a time, and correcting them as though the child has been careless teaches nothing they can apply to the next one.
- Session length
- 45 minSession length
- Maximum students in a group
- 4Maximum students in a group
- Sessions a week
- 3–4Sessions a week
Common questions
What English should a Grade 3 student be able to do?
Read a longer story independently and describe a character with evidence, punctuate direct speech with speech marks, use apostrophes in contractions, write multi-clause sentences, and produce an organised recount or set of instructions.
Why does my child put apostrophes on plurals?
Because they have learned that an apostrophe goes near an s and have not yet learned what it is for. The test that works is whether letters are missing: 'do not' loses an o, so 'don't' takes one, and 'bananas' loses nothing.
Should I correct 'goed' and 'catched'?
Say the correct form back rather than marking it as an error. The child has applied the past tense rule correctly and English is the exception; irregular verbs are learned one at a time as vocabulary, not deduced from a rule.
Sources
- Cambridge Primary English curriculum — Cambridge Assessment International Education
- Cambridge Primary English Curriculum Framework 0058 — Cambridge Assessment International Education
- National curriculum in England: English programmes of study — Department for Education
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