Focus Narrative:

Picture Book🔗

Key Text/Stimulus:

Little Turtle Turns the Tide

Writing Outcomes:

Overview

In this unit, children explore how stories can communicate an important environmental message. Inspired by Little Turtle Turns the Tide, they will consider how human actions and natural events can affect animals and their habitats, and how stories can encourage people to care for the world around them.

Writing Task

Write and illustrate a short children’s picture book about a little animal that encounters an environmental problem. This could include pollution, plastic waste, deforestation, wildfire, flooding or damage to its habitat. Show how the problem affects the animal, what happens as a result and how the situation might be improved or resolved. End your story with a clear message about protecting the environment.

Writing Focus

Create a clear story with a beginning, problem, resolution and ending. Use description to bring the animal, setting and environmental problem to life, choosing powerful verbs and adjectives to create an impact on the reader. Include dialogue where appropriate and organise the story into paragraphs. Carefully balance words and illustrations so that the pictures help to tell the story and communicate its environmental message.

Focus Grammar

Relative clauses

• Two types of clause, including subordinate clauses

• Three sentence types

• Comma rules in three sentence types

Consolidation from Y2

Consolidation from Y3

Debate, Freeze-frames

Poetry performance

Focus Non-Narrative:Performance Poetry

Key Text/Stimulus:

Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats

Outcome:

Overview

In this unit, children explore the playful poetry of Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, considering how language, rhythm, rhyme and repetition help to create memorable characters and engage an audience.

Task

Prepare and perform a poem from Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. Explore the meaning and language of the poem, thinking carefully about the personality of the cat and how this can be communicated through performance. Rehearse the poem before performing it confidently to an audience.

Focus

Explore the poem’s rhythm, rhyme, repetition and choice of language, considering how these features create mood and character. Use expression, intonation, volume, pace, pauses, gesture and movement to bring the poem to life. Work individually or as a group to rehearse and refine the performance so that it is fluent, engaging and clearly communicates the meaning of the poem.

Cross-curriculum support genres:

Labels, lists & captions

Non Chronological Reports

Pathway: Storytelling Through Drawing

Explore how artists create sequenced drawings to share and tell stories. Create accordian books or comic strips to retell poetry or prose through drawing.

Disciplines:

Drawing, Sketchbooks

Medium:

Drawing Materials, Paper

Artists:

Laura Carlin, Shaun Tan

What techniques can artists use to make their storytelling drawings more effective?Artists use line, shape, colour, and composition to add feeling and focus. They can include text, experiment with mark-making, and plan how images flow across a page to guide the viewer through a narrative.

Sequence – A series of drawings placed in order to show how a story unfolds.

Composition – How elements like characters and background are arranged on the page.

Narrative – A story or account of events told through words or images.

Feedback, sharing ideas, instruction

Pathway: Gymnastics

Focus: Movements, balances and sequence composition🔗 (Lessons 7-12)

This unit builds on the strong foundation pupils will already have creating gymnastic movements and balances. Pupils already know how to link movements with flow and can do so using a range of different movements and balances. This foundation is essential as pupils will be challenged to improve their creative skills as they design sequences on a variety of apparatus. Pupils will learn to include more advanced skills such as changes in level and direction, working in pairs and groups to evaluate and improve their performances.

Newcastle United Foundation:

Modified Team Games

Feedback, sharing ideas, verbal instructions, explanations

Disciplines:

Cooking and Nutrition

Pathway: Adapting a recipe 🔗

Designing and making biscuits for a chosen target audience by exploring existing products, following recipes and evaluating ingredients, taste and appearance. Pupils develop food preparation skills by adapting a biscuit recipe, creating their own design and evaluating how well their finished product meets the design criteria.

Context Link:

Portal Design - Greggs the baker have commissioned the children to create a new biscuit product. Children will design, make and evaluate their biscuits, considering ingredients, flavour, appearance and how well the finished product meets the commission.

How can a recipe be adapted to meet a particular need?A recipe can be adapted by changing the ingredients or quantities to suit a particular audience or purpose. When making changes, we should consider the taste, texture and appearance of the food as well as the available budget.

Adapt – To change or adjust something so that it is suitable for a different purpose or person.

Quantity – The amount of an ingredient needed in a recipe.

Budget – The amount of money available to spend when planning and making a product.

Singing together

Pathway: how stories are shared through song

By now, pupils have sung songs that help them to express themselves, that have been used as working songs and that bring communities together. We continue to develop our questioning of why we sing by introducing singing to tell a story. This unit allows pupils to make connections between the musical elements of dynamics, pitch and tempo and the emotion or story the song is conveying. This prepares pupils for later units in which we understand the power of song for unity and for protest. Singing in unison here is a stepping stone to combining storytelling and part singing together.

Describe things and people: singular adjective agreement, to be being🔗

Lesson 1 and 6

This unit develops pupils’ use of reference resources and builds on knowledge of nouns and adjectives, consolidated through written practice in new contexts. Having previously learnt the most common meaning of ‘tener’ to have, pupils now learn its idiomatic meaning to be. This, together with the learning of possessives ‘mi’ and ‘tu’ and pronouns ‘él’ and ‘la’ broadens pupils’ communicative range, enabling them to talk about age, physical states and their favourite things. Extending cultural knowledge, the end of this unit recycles new and previous language in the context of Christmas in Peru.