Reception / Year 1 English Plans (Set B)

Fantasy stories are fun to read and exciting to write. The Way to the Zoo by John Burningham and This book just ate my dog by Richard Byrne are the stimulus for this unit. The children make predictions about plot; they create and describe settings and work collaboratively to plan their own fantasy story. Children develop the concept of writing in simple and compound sentences and understand the importance of using description in their writing.

Children use I Really Want to Eat a Child, What the Jackdaw Saw and The Something to stimulate the writing of character profiles, descriptions and new stories. They reinforce reading skills and focus on developing handwriting and accurate punctuation.

Instructions are necessary to do things you don’t know how! Using The Queen’s Hat by Simon Anthony children learn how to use prepositions and adverbs when giving instructions. They will know how to use exclamation marks when writing commands and also how to use capital letters and full stops accurately. Children will follow sets of instructions to make a hat, and then design their own hat and write instructions for others to follow.

Whales are incredible! In this unit children will develop an understanding for the features of non-fiction texts. They will use Storm Whale by Benji Davies and Big Blue Whale by Nicola Davies to learn the differences between fiction and non-fiction. Through group reading tasks of non-fiction texts they will learn how to select and retrieve information to answer questions. Children will learn how to write questions, draw labelled illustrations, write captions and write statements. They will create their own non-chronological report, and contribute to a group non-fiction book, which they will present to an audience.  

Children enjoy reading, writing and reciting a range of humorous riddles before then looking in detail at more sustained ‘question’ poems. Through these they develop skills with rhyme, alliteration and the use of powerful descriptive vocabulary.

In this unit, children focus on learning a selection of old-fashioned poems off-by-heart. They develop the skills of oral performance and working collaboratively to read and appreciate new and unfamiliar texts. Through the adaptation of well-known poems children compose their own humorous interpretations and improve their skills of presentation to publish their own texts.