Carlton Hill Primary School

Poetry:  Where do you get your ideas? (1 week)

Stimulus: ‘Where do you get your ideas?’ by Sue Hardy-Dawson

Purpose and Audience: write a poem to be performed to the school in assembly

Key knowledge and skills:

• through poetry we can express our unique ideas

• collect ideas and images and play with the sequence
• enjoy word-play and create unusual and surprising combinations
• read my own writing aloud to an audience in an entertaining way

Fiction (modern fables): The Tin Forest – descriptive writing (2 weeks)

Stimulus: ‘The Tin Forest’ by Helen Ward and ‘The promise’ by Nicola Davies

Purpose and Audience: create story settings that paint vivid pictures in the mind of your reader

Key knowledge and skills:

• consider how authors develop settings
• use imaginative and rich vocabulary drawn from reading
• expand noun phrases by the addition of modifying adjectives and preposition phrases

Non-fiction: Guide to a local attraction (3 weeks)

Stimulus: ‘i360 leaflet’ and other leaflets

Purpose and Audience: write an information leaflet that promotes a local attraction we have visited

Key knowledge and skills:

• understand the purpose of promotional leaflets and media

• use subheadings and summarise information
• reuse new words from other leaflets
• plan and write paragraphs around a key idea

Fiction: The present (2 weeks)

Stimulus: ‘The Present’ short film

Purpose and Audience: this unit is a whole-class sentence intervention

Key knowledge and skills:

• develop sentence awareness across the class

• change fragments into full, accurate sentences

• identify and correct run-ons using conjunctions

Poetry: 6 ways of looking at the moon and the sea (1 week)

Stimulus: ‘6 ways of looking at the moon’ by Pie Corbett

Purpose and Audience: create a poem that impacts on the reader

Key knowledge and skills:

• use metaphor to combine idea and create imagery
• select rich and imaginative and vocabulary carefully
• assess the effectiveness of writing and suggest improvements

Poetry:  The Minotaur (1 week)

Stimulus: ‘The Minotaur’ by Rachael M Nicholas

Purpose and Audience: understand a narrative poem and perform it using intonation, tone, volume and action. 

Key knowledge and skills:

• prepare a poem to read aloud and to perform (intonation, tone, volume and action)
• recognise some different forms of poetry and ask questions 
• discuss words and phrases that capture the reader’s interest and imagination

Non-fiction: Celts versus Romans (3 weeks)

Stimulus: ‘Celts’ by Jane Bingham

Purpose and Audience: write an information page and present information in a way that excites young readers

Key knowledge and skills:

• continue to organise paragraphs around a theme (cont. from Y3)
• express time, place and cause using conjunctions and prepositions (cont. from Y3)

• explore exciting new ways of presenting information

Non-fiction: Eco heroes – explanation (2 weeks)

Stimulus: ‘Guardians of the planet’ by Clive Gifford

‘Planet for sale’ by Sue Hardy Dawson

Purpose and Audience:  explain to our school community how to become an eco-hero.

Key knowledge and skills:

• use our reading skills to learn about climate change
• build on previously learned language of cause and effect
• organise paragraphs around a theme

Fiction: The Minotaur (4 weeks)

Stimulus: ‘Theseus and the Minotaur’ by A. Horowitz

Purpose and Audience: create a legend in the style of ‘The Minotaur’, involving gifts and a dangerous creature

Key knowledge and skills:

• retell myths and legends orally
• understand the term ‘adverbial’ and use a wide variety of fronted adverbials (with a comma)
• use a variety of conjunctions, noun phrases and pronouns (to avoid repetition)

Diary: A cat that was not quite a cat (3 weeks)

Stimulus: ‘Varjak Paw’ by SF Said

Purpose and Audience: diary entries from different viewpoints – Varjak and Holly meet a toy cat. Share our writing on SF Said’s very active blog.

Key knowledge and skills:

• explore and use the features typical of diary writing
• continue to use a variety of prepositions
• give reasons for word choices: ‘this is effective because…’ and edit word choices

Non-fiction: Eco heroes – persuasion (3 weeks)

Stimulus: ‘Guardians of the planet’ by Clive Gifford

‘Planet for sale’ by Sue Hardy Dawson

Purpose and Audience:  persuade our school community to stop wasting food.

Key knowledge and skills:

• understand and use persuasive devices
• take part in discussion and debate
• identify fact and opinion

Poetry: Old Foxy (1 week)

Stimulus: ‘Old foxy’ by Sue Hardy-Dawson

Purpose and Audience: explore a poem about one urban scavenger and then create a poem about another one (seagull)

Key knowledge and skills:

• present a poem as a shape poem
• discuss word choices that capture the imagination
• expand noun phrases by the addition of modifying adjectives and preposition phrases

 Narrative: Tam’s story (3 weeks)

Stimulus: ‘Varjak Paw’ by SF Said

Purpose and Audience: Write a new part of the story (Tam’s story) in the style of SF Said. Read it to a small audience.

Key knowledge and skills:

• compose a narrative written from another character's point of view
• draft and write by organising paragraphs around a theme
• discuss words and phrases that capture readers’ interest and imagination

 Fiction: Recount – News report (3 weeks)

Stimulus: ‘The Iron Man’ by Ted Hughes, ‘The Iron Giant’ (film)

Purpose and Audience: news reports for local people about the Iron Man’s arrival, destruction of machinery and heroism.

Key knowledge and skills:

• transfer drama ideas into direct quotes sentences, using inverted commas and other punctuation
• use eyewitness accounts and structural features of news reports
• use a variety of fronted adverbials (often followed by a comma)

Fiction: Fox Friend – character/dilemma (3 weeks)

Stimulus: ‘Fox Friend’ by Michael Morpurgo

Purpose and Audience: create a dilemma story with strong lead character for a year 4 audience

Key knowledge and skills:

• know that through stories we can explore real-life problems

• explore how authors set up dilemmas and solutions
• use details to build strong character descriptions
• use adverbs and prepositions to make links between paragraphs