Year 4 English Plans

Using David Walliams’ Billionaire Boy and Mr Stink, children investigate, read and write humorous stories. They exercise their imagination and develop rounded characters as they explore their own humorous style as they investigate the distinctive style of other authors. They investigate dialogue and structure, and organise paragraphs appropriately.

Immerse yourselves in some wonderful stories from the great and diverse continent of Africa. Read Africa is not a Country by Margy Burns Knight, Mufaro’s Beautiful Daughters retold by John Steptoe and The Pot of Wisdom – Ananse stories retold by Adwoa Badoe. Write an Ananse story using extended sentences.

Through Morpurgo's touching The Butterfly Lion, children explore fiction with an element of fantasy. Children think about narrator, setting and the impact of language choice. Listening to the majority of the novel, children read selected extracts, discussing and responding to the text. Activities include letter-writing, role-play, hot-seating the the unit culminates with children writing an extra chapter for the novel. Grammar includes:  1st/3rd person, adverbs and adverbials, and dialogue punctuation.

Are zoos good or bad? Children look at information to help them decide their own opinion on this matter, beginning with Zoo by Anthony Browne and Rainbow Bear by Michael Morpurgo before moving on to analysing different persuasive writing. Finally they will write to persuade us to be for or against zoos!

Children explore chronological reports through reading and discussing the inspirational true life texts: Henry's Freedom Box and Who Was Rosa Parks? They create story maps, write letters and newspaper reports; and explore dialogue through drama. Grammar focuses include: past tense; present perfect form and using conjunctions, adverbs and prepositions to express time and cause. The unit ends with investigation and games exploring prefixes.

Learn about changes in fashion from 1066 onwards by reading Fashion: The History of Clothes by Jacqueline Morley. Write detailed descriptions about clothes and decide whether clothes now or in Tudor times were better. Look at the ideas of Vivienne Westwood.

Using Edward Lear's Book of Nonsense, Hamilton's version of The Pobble With No Toes, and Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll, study the features that poets use when creating nonsense poems. Plan, create and perform your own imaginative poems and concentrate on rhythm, rhyming patterns and syllable usage in poetry.

Children immerse themselves in poetry and learn some poems by heart, inspired by Off By Heart – Poems for YOU to Remember. From learning short poems, they move on to a longer poem of their choice and explore prepositions and fronted adverbials.

Love chocolate, but hate greens? Children investigate the contrasting styles of ode and insult poetry. A range of poetry is included in the resources, the most well-known of which is Shelley's To a Skylark. Simile, metaphor and hyperbole are explored, as children read, discuss, role-play and write on topics including food and birds. The unit ends in a poetry show-down. Which ode will win? Grammar comprises: dialogue punctuation; nouns and pronouns.