Year 3 English - The Twits

Our English Learning Journey with The Twits by Roald Dahl

In the Autumn, our Year 3 children immerse themselves in Roald Dahl’s hilarious classic, The Twits. This much-loved story offers a rich opportunity to explore vivid characterisation, playful language, and strong moral themes — while developing essential reading, writing, and SPaG skills in engaging and purposeful ways.

Reading Skills Developed

Through guided and whole-class reading sessions, children develop key comprehension strategies drawn from the National Curriculum reading domains. Using The Twits as our core text, pupils learn to:

• Retrieve key information and details from the text when describing characters and settings.
• Infer characters’ feelings, motives, and actions, particularly when analysing how Mr and Mrs Twit treat each other and the animals.
• Summarise events and chapters to build their understanding of narrative structure and sequencing.
• Explore vocabulary, focusing on how Dahl’s word choices create humour, disgust, and vivid imagery.
• Explain and justify opinions, such as why Roald Dahl makes the reader sympathise with the Muggle-Wumps and despise the Twits.

These sessions also encourage lively discussion, prediction, and empathy — all crucial to developing confident, thoughtful readers.

Writing Opportunities

Our writing tasks are closely linked to the story, giving children authentic reasons to write while developing their creativity and control. During our Twits unit, pupils produce a variety of written outcomes including:

• Character descriptions of Mr and Mrs Twit, focusing on expanded noun phrases and precise adjectives to evoke disgust and humour.
• Setting descriptions of their revolting home and garden, using sensory details to bring scenes vividly to life.
• Narrative retelling key chapters, developing cohesion and paragraphing while maintaining Dahl’s lively tone.
• Speech bubbles and dialogue writing, where children write in role to explore character relationships and speech punctuation.
• A book review, encouraging evaluative writing, paragraph organisation, and the use of persuasive language.

These outcomes allow pupils to write for different purposes — to entertain, inform, and express viewpoint — while continually building stamina and fluency as writers.

Spelling, Punctuation and Grammar (SPaG) Focus

Throughout this unit, pupils revisit and apply the key Year 3 objectives for sentence structure and punctuation, including:

• Introducing compound and complex sentences with coordinating and subordinating conjunctions (and, but, because, when, if, so).
• Extending sentences with adverbials of time and place
• Using accurate demarcation (capital letters, full stops, question and exclamation marks).
• Introducing inverted commas correctly in speech.
• Maintaining consistent verb tense (past and present).
• Expanding vocabulary choices through precise adjectives and powerful verbs.

SPaG is taught explicitly and then applied within children’s written work, ensuring learning is purposeful and contextualised.

Why We Teach The Twits

The Twits is a perfect text to inspire Year 3 writers and readers. Its memorable characters, mischievous humour and moral lessons make it accessible and enjoyable for all learners. The book provides a strong foundation for teaching essential literacy skills while promoting a love of reading and story.