Zimbabwe Grade 3 Indigenous Languages (Shona or Ndebele)

The Grade 3 Indigenous Languages curriculum focuses on developing listening, speaking, reading, and writing skills in either Shona or Ndebele. The curriculum aims to equip learners with the ability to communicate effectively in diverse situations, cultivate a lifelong reading habit, foster critical thinking, enhance creative writing skills, and promote an appreciation for cultural heritage.

Curriculum Content:

• Listening: Recognizing sounds, letter sounds, syllables, and words; comprehending news, stories, and folktales; following instructions and questions; engaging in dialogues; enjoying rhymes, jingles, songs, poems, and riddles; understanding times of the day.
• Speaking: Expressing likes and dislikes; describing roles of self and family members; explaining processes and events; counting; retelling stories and news; reciting rhymes, poems, and riddles; making requests, constructing sentences, and giving instructions; practicing correct pronunciation; discussing months and seasons; sharing knowledge of heritage, myths, and taboos.
• Reading: Developing fluency and proficiency; reading sentences, instructions, news, stories, folktales, rhymes, jingles, songs, poems, and riddles; comprehending texts; engaging in extensive reading; interpreting graphs, maps, tables, and cartoons; understanding language usage.
• Writing: Practicing penmanship (Nelson's script); answering comprehension questions; engaging in creative writing (stories, poems); using punctuation marks correctly; spelling and dictation; composing various texts; understanding language structure and usage.

Supporting Language Structures:

The curriculum also covers supporting language structures, including:

• Nouns and Pronouns: Common and proper nouns, collective nouns, names of quantities.
• Verb Tenses: Simple present, progressive, simple past, immediate/recent past, simple future.
• Qualifiers and Modifiers: Adjectives, modifiers, and their opposites.
• Sentences: Simple and joined sentences, conjunctions.
• Punctuation: Full stop, comma, capital letters, question mark.

Assessment:

Learners are continuously assessed through projects, tests, and oral/aural assignments. Summative assessments at the end of the Grade 7 year evaluate listening, speaking, reading, and writing skills.