Year 4 English Plans

Reading a wide range of fables, including Rosen's Aesop's Fables, children explore dialogue through drama, debate moral messages and write letters in role. Children write their own fables, hold a festival and try them out on a live audience. Will they win rave reviews?

Explore familiar settings by meeting Horrid Henry and his friends (and enemies). In particular read Horrid Henry and Horrid Henry’s Birthday Party both by Francesca Simon. Learn about and use adverbs, adverbials and prepositions. Write a new Horrid Henry story.

Children use How to Train Your Dragon  to study fantasy. They study plot lines through story maps and learn to create their own, developing characters and settings on a theme. They use dialogue in writing an effective and engaging story. Grammar includes looking at adverbs, adjectives, pronouns, and the use of paragraphs.

Read the intriguing story The Hole, by Oyvind Torseter. Children ask and answer questions and use inference skills to speculate about what is happening. They generate powerful vocabulary and revise parts of speech. They then write their own version or a sequel based on the book.

This creative unit uses art activities and the book The Usborne Complete Book of Art Ideas as a vehicle for instruction writing. Children will practise using imperative verbs and pronouns. They then learn about explanation writing.

The children read, map out and learn by heart a text about drums. They produce a shared text about the tabla drums and then use this as a model for their own report writing and an oral presentation about a chosen instrument.

Children discuss inventions and imagine what it might be like to go to a school in the future using Hamilton’s animated tale – Was it Better Now? They explore the wonderful book Leonardo da Vinci for Kids, His Life and Ideas  and write a short imaginative autobiography about their lives now and in the future.

A picture is worth a thousand words? Not if you choose those words wisely! Children explore how simile and metaphor can be used to create powerful images, though reading and discussing poems. Photographs, collage and Jeannie Baker's Window inspire children's own image poetry.

Read and study haikus, tankas and cinquains recognising the syllabic structure and use of powerful verbs and descriptive language. Study the use of adverbs and adverbials to enhance the poetry. Children write some in traditional style about seasons and nature. They then use computers to manipulate images enhancing the poetry presentation.

It’s Raining Cats and Dogs! Children explore lots of poems about dogs, cats and other pets. They investigate the form and language of a poem and make comparisons. Children write and perform poems from the point of view of one of their pets.