2025-2026

Autumn 1

Writing

We will start the new term with a three-week workshop to consolidate our grammar and punctuation skills.

We will then be following the Literacy Tree approach in our school Writing curriculum using recommended texts to inspire and produce quality writing.

Our first text is ‘The Tin Forest’ by Helen Ward. The sequence of learning begins with children arriving to class to find that rubbish has been emptied out all over the floor! They look at ways that the rubbish could be sifted and sorted, and even recycled into something new. Children will explore the main character and the journey he goes through in clearing up the rubbish around his little house and transforming it into a beautiful forest of tin. Through the sequence, children write in role as the old man, producing diary entries and wishes and also write a postcard to him to pass on some advice. The Writing Root finishes with children writing a persuasive information leaflet to encourage others to protect an area in the local environment. This book would work well alongside learning on conservation, climate change and the plant life cycle.

We will continue to practise our handwriting and spelling skills using the ‘Penpals for Handwriting’ and ‘No Nonsense Spelling’ schemes.

Reading

For our Reading sessions, we will be following the ‘Literacy Leaves’ approach from Literacy Tree. Using quality texts, our aim is to create and nurture a love of reading whilst at the same time enabling children to develop a range of age-related reading skills through a variety of tasks and activities.

This term our chosen books are as follows:

‘The Lost Spells’ by Robert MacFarlane and Jackie Morris. Three poems have been selected to explore through the use of this resource: Jackdaw, Grey Seal and Wood Pecker. A range of poetry devices; the structure and form of the poems as well as comprehension activities have been planned for and there are opportunities for the children to develop skills in performing poetry out-loud

‘Arthur and the Golden Rope’ by Joe Todd Stanton. Imagine a vault so cavernous that it could contain all the world’s greatest treasures and relics, from mummified remains of ancient monarchs to glistening swords brandished by legendary warriors. Who could be in charge of such a vault and how did he come into possession of such a unique collection? Who is...Professor Brownstone?

Summer 2.

Writing.

This half term, we will be beginning a narrative write based on the book 'The Feathered Serpent and the Five Suns'. With this adventure story we will investigate the skills of using speech, three predicate sentences,  expanded noun phrases and non finite clauses. 

For our final written piece we will explore poetry again with a climate themed poem. We will use ambitious adjectives, similes and ambitious adverbs.

Reading.

Our reading skill this half term is sequencing. We will practice this with aspects of our chosen texts. 

Our class read continues to be 'The boy who grew dragons' and we continue to read a selection of our favourite and new poems.

Summer 1

Writing

This half term we will begin our setting description writing. We will use the book ‘The Tin Forest’ by Helen Ward as a starting point and provide the book with a written setting description of the forest the old man creates.

We will use similes, expanded noun phrases, ambitious verbs and adverbs and ensure we can use ‘a’ and ‘an’ correctly.

We will be reading ‘The tear Thief’ by Carol Ann Duffy to gain inspiration for ambitious vocabulary and amazing similes.

In the final section of this half term, we will write a set of instructions on ‘How to plant a sunflower’. This will be based on our knowledge of planting sunflowers seeds (which will be doing in the first part of the half term.)

We will use imperative verbs, time adverbs and adverbs of manner after exploring several instruction texts.

Reading Skill

This half term our reading skill is Fill the gap questions.  

Our class read will be 'The boy who grew dragons!' by Andy Shepherd.

We continue to read a selection of poems each week, discussing which are our favourites and why.

Spring 2

Writing.

Our first English unit will be poetry. We will explore a variety of styles of poems before learning skills to write our own poem based on emotions. We will explore similes, rhetorical questions and adverbs of manner to create engaging poems.

Our second piece will be writing a letter to persuade our school kitchen for the need for healthy dinners. We will explore a range of persuasive features and letters writing formats before writing and delivering our letters.

Reading.

Our reading skill this half term is answering multiple choice questions. We will use skimming, scanning and close reading to select the correct answer based on the text. Will will use information about mental health and general health within these sessions.

Poetry -

Throughout the poetry unit, we will read poems each day to immerse ourselves in a variety of poetry styles. We will also use the book 'Love That Dog' by Sharon Creech to look at free verse poems.

Our class read will continue to be 'The Wild Way Home.'

Spring 1

Writing

This half term, we will be building on our fiction writing skills by writing our second narrative. We will be exploring the wonderful book 'Stone Age Boy' by Satoshi Kitamura in which a young boy travels back and discovers a whole new way of living. We will be building on our knowledge of how to use paragraphs, creative effective, descriptive scene setting, speech and narrative structures. 

We will be using our Rainbow Grammar card to build in sentence structures such as non-finite clauses and three predicate sentences. 

Reading

This term, our reading will focus on true or false statements and asking questions. These are essential skills which will help our children apply their previous reading skills, such as skimming and scanning.

We will be using the following texts during our writing and reading lessons:

Stone Age Boy and The non fiction book 'Stone Age'.

For our class reader we will be enjoying 'The Wild Way Home' by Sophie Kirtley. 

When Charlie’s longed-for brother is born with a serious heart condition, Charlie’s world is turned upside down. Upset and afraid, Charlie flees the hospital and makes for the ancient forest on the edge of town. There Charlie finds a boy floating face-down in the stream, injured, but alive. But when Charlie sets off back to the hospital to fetch help, it seems the forest has changed. It’s become a place as strange and wild as the boy dressed in deerskins. For Charlie has unwittingly fled into the Stone Age, with no way to help the boy or return to the present day. Or is there?

What follows is a wild, big-hearted adventure as Charlie and the Stone Age boy set out together to find what they have lost – their courage, their hope, their family and their way home.

Writing.

In English this half term, we will firstly be writing a biography of the African emperor Septimius Severus. We will research facts about his life during our history lessons and use these to write paragraphs about the different aspects of his life.

Our second unit will complement our art project 'what is art?'. In this unit we will write a persuasive text to persuade our audience that text can be art! 

In Rainbow Grammar sessions, we will use subordinating conjunctions and fronted adverbials to enhance our biographies and our persuasive writing.

Reading

Our reading skill this half term is 'matching'. We will build on skills learned during Autumn 1 to skim, scan and close read texts to enable us to match information correctly. We will use information from our history topic of The Romans during our reading lessons.