Year 4 English Plans

Children explore a variety of myths and enjoy the mythical creatures introduced in Can You Catch A Mermaid?, The Seal Children and Beowulf. They learn these tales and use them as stimuli for creating their own myths and legends. They use the texts as models to help develop their understanding of detailed description in writing and correct grammar. Please note The Seal Children is currently out of print and will be republished May 2016.

Using The Princess and the Pea (Lauren child) and The Pea and the Princess (Mini Grey), children explore, read and write fairytales with a twisted point of view. Children write dialogue, and explore tense and pronouns, before role-playing and writing short playscripts, inspired by Beware of the Storybook Wolves. The unit ends with a chance to perform their writing to an audience.

This plan draws on stories about the rainforest and uses these to explore the lives of people in very different circumstances. Children develop empathy for different characters and the issues involved, and use their understanding to enable them to produce their own story based in the rainforest. 

Read Little Mouse’s Big Book of Fears by Emily Gravett and enjoy her unusual style. Children discuss fears they had when they were little and create a recount page for a class book. They write a fictional recount about an animal escaping from a predator.

By reading The Wolves in the Walls (Dave McKean and Neil Gaiman), Wolves (Emily Gravett), and Top Gun of the Sky (Martin Bradley), children will investigate non-chronological reports. They will discover exciting facts about British wildlife, look at the key-features of this style of writing, and produce their own interesting reports in order to effectively share information.

Find out about an area of rainforest in Australia in Where the Forest Meets the Sea. Make a persuasive poster inspired by the book. Explore how rainforest destruction can affect indigenous peoples in The Vanishing Rainforest and write a persuasive article about these issues.

Study a range of list poems including some based on similes. Look in detail at the word types used: nouns, adjectives, verbs, prepositions and adverbs. Then investigate kenning poems – contracted metaphor list poems. Children are inspired to write some poetry.

Inspired by Julia Donaldson's Poems to Perform: A Classic collection, children watch, perform, read and write a range of performance poetry. Children tell tales, using possessive apostrophes and explore the uses of pronouns, editing poetry and writing profiles about themselves as performer poets. The unit ends with children preparing to share their learning with a wider audience!

Explore a variety of narrative poetry including Michael Rosen’s You Wait Till I’m Older Than You, Willow Pattern, How the Tortoise got Its Shell, Wolf’s Wife Speaks, Maggie and the Dinosaur and The Last Dinosaur, children identify features that poets use then learn, recite and write their own poems that tell a story.