Supporting your Year 3 child's learning at home

In school, because of the size of classes, teachers tend to whizz through many forms of punctuation teaching, and children can be left with huge gaps in their knowledge. TheSchoolRun has guides to using all punctuation marks correctly, from full stops to apostrophes and dashes, but in Year 3 the punctuation mark to focus on is the comma.

In Year 3, children are taught to identify features (such as specific words and forms of punctuation) that writers use in order to provoke reaction from the reader.

When you read stories together, note any interesting, rich language (referred to in school as "wow words" or "powerful verbs"). Look for punctuation such as exclamation marks. Discuss how the use of punctuation and wonderful vocabulary changes the way we read.

In Year 3 children learn about formats and layouts for writing.

Have a look at some journalistic writing – you'll need to be selective about the news your child is exposed to, but First News is a really good bet for child-friendly news stories to work from. Ask them to look at the titles, the sub-headings and how the paragraphs are structured.

There is a wealth of educational magazines available for children, so you could consider taking out a subscription to offer your child topical reading material delivered through the post.

Encourage your child to write their own newspaper story at home, using the same format and structure of the news stories they read elsewhere. Talk to them about who the reader is, and what they already know. What are the most important things for them to learn?

For example, if they're writing about the coronavirus outbreak of 2020, your child might like to direct their writing at their past self, at a person who has been cut off from the world and is unaware of the situation, or even an alien from another planet! By writing for all three audiences they’ll get a great understanding of how the way facts are described is subject to change, based on the reader.

Being able to estimate is a key area of maths throughout primary school. In Year 3, children should be able to check their estimates with more accurate measuring.

If your child is unsure about what an estimate is, explain it as a ‘clever guess’ – i.e. a guess that you’ve given lots of thought to. When estimating, you use what you do know to work out what you don’t (for example, your child might know that their ruler is 30cm long, so be able to estimate that a book that's slightly shorter is 25cm long).

To reinforce your child's school learning at home, give them an estimation measurement challenge. Draw a table with three columns – one for the name of the objects they’re to measure, one for their estimate and one for the actual measurement. Have them walk around the house, looking for objects to estimate the height and width of, then ask them to measure them, carefully, with a ruler or tape measure. Demonstrate how to measure carefully, with the 0 right at the end of the object.

By the end of Year 3 your child should be able to count from 0 in multiples of 2, 4, 5, 8, 10, 50 and 100. This prepares them for more formal times-tables learning.

It's a good idea to use tangible resources from time to time when doing the counting, to give them a sense of what the numbers ‘look like’ – for example, you could use coins for 2s, 5s, 10s, and 50s, or draw arrays to represent the numbers pictorially (TheSchoolRun's explanation of the concrete pictorial abstract approach in maths is useful reading).

As with all things times tables related, regular practice is what’s key here.

A few times a week, say you’re going to warm their maths brains up with some counting and just go for it! If they’re not confident counting in, say, 4s, just try and add a couple more numbers on each time you do it.

Learning these multiples really does form the foundation of so much future learning in maths, so making sure they’ve nailed it by the time they start Year 4 would be a big plus! Our Times Tables Learning Journey offers resources in the order your child is asked to learn them in, to help you organise the workload.

Children in Year 3 are beginning to use fractions on a basic level, and it’s a great area to practise in the real-life setting of the home, as there’s ample opportunity for concrete examples.

Every time your child has to share something with you or a sibling, it's a chance to discuss how it’ll be divided. Pizzas and cakes are perhaps the most obvious fractions learning aid (does everyone get an eighth? If so, will any second helpings be available?). But lots of other things can be shared, too – talk about giving halves / quarters, and try to encourage accuracy in their measuring.

The national curriculum states that Year 3 pupils should be able to write and calculate mathematical statements for multiplication and division, working with two-digit numbers and one-digit numbers.

You can find lots of multiplication worksheets and division worksheets on TheSchoolRun but it’s also a good idea to get your child to write their own calculations. Why not try multiplication / division bingo to liven up the process? Ask your child to prepare a bingo board and write out some numbers 0-10. What calculations result in those numbers? Ask your child to tick them off until they get a full house!

Year 3 children often find it useful to use visual representations for multiplication and addition.

For instance, for 4 x 10, they might like to draw out multiplication arrays (four rows of ten).

For 18 divided by 6 they might like to draw 18 dots and circle them in groups of dots, counting up the circles.

Encourage these visual representations, as it helps children to give real meaning to what can sometimes seem like abstract calculations.