English

Summer term topics

Summer 1 - Gulliver's Travels

Click on the link to watch Gulliver's Travel

Spring term topics

Spring 1 - The Mousehole Cat 

Mowzer the cat lives with his owner, Tom the fisherman, in a beautiful seaside village in Cornwall called Mousehole. One day, a huge storm begins to batter the harbour walls, and no-one can leave to fish anymore. With Christmas around the corner, there is no food to be found in the village. So Mowzer and Tom decide to set out to sea and bravely face the Great Storm-Cat together. 

Click on the link to watch a trailer for the story.

Explore the whole illustrated story by clicking on the link

There was lots of new and interesting voabulary for us to explore within this book.

We took time to explore the main characters, their actions and intentions.

Using the original story as a basis, we planned our own story with a different setting.

Spring 2 - The Last Bear

The Last Bears is a beautiful story (I read it last summer in preparation for Year 4 and fell in love with it straight away). It is about the story of the extinction of the brown bear from the point of view of a young girl. April travels to a remote island (Bear Island) with her had as he is sent there to work. While there she explores the island and comes across a starving, lonely bear. Slowly, April gains the bear's trust and the pair form a strong friendship, but as she grows further apart from her father, she resolves to help Bear get back where he belongs - no matter what it takes.

Click on the link to hear from the author Hannah Gold, as she introduces the book and how she got the idea to write the story.

We spent time reading and learning about polar bears and gathering facts to use within this unit of work

We looked at a range of language tools needed when writing our own text and then highlighted these features in a range of material that we read.

Throughout our reading and gathering evidence phase, we explored interesting sentences starters.

After watching a new report and the performance of 7 year old Aneeshwar Kunchala on Britain's Got Talent, we working in small groups to present our own information about climate change.

Using inspiration from There's a Rang-tan in my bedroom we wrote our own poems based around polar bears.

Autumn term topics

Autumn 1 - The Firework-Maker's Daughter

The Firework-Makers daughter is a fantasy story. This genre includes elements of magic and the setting is in a fictional universe.  Towards the end of the unit, children will be writing their own version following the structure of the original story. 

We made our own firework paintings before listing adjectives and adverbs that could describe them.

After reading chapter 1, we took part in role play to step into the roles of Lila and Lanchand. We they completed thought books and write diary enteries from the point of view of Lila.

Here the final story from one member of our class.

Explore the clips before to familiarise yourself with The Fireworkmakers Daughter.

English KS1 / KS2: The Firework-Maker’s Daughter' by Philip Pullman - BBC Teach

The Firework-Makers Daughter, chapter 1 https://youtu.be/a5hkaO_iRSw 

A PDF of the full story can be found in the files section.

Autumn 1 - Poerty

Autumn 2 - Rumaysa

The Rumaysa is a fantasy story, based on a well know fairy tale.   Towards the end of the unit, children will be firstly rewriting the story from one of the characters point of view. We will then be innovating the story, changing the characters and part of the setting before writing our own version of the 'twisted fairy tale'. 

We spent time exploring the main characters.

We had lots of fun stepping into the mirror and taking on the role of different characters. Working in pairs, children developed short conversations linked to snippets of the book.

We used the lyrics from the Frozen song, 'Let it go,' to develop our own short song as it it was sung my Rumaysa while she was locked in the tower. We then used our song lyrics to transfer the content into a letter, asking for help. Responses from the heroic character were also written.

All of our gathering content was then put together into our final piece of writting.

Files to Download