Years 5 and 6 Information Text Writing Unit - Anglo-Saxons

A fifteen-lesson writing unit, leading students towards writing their own information text based on Anglo-Saxon society.
Students spend time at the start of the unit researching the different ranks of Anglo-Saxon society so they can write a text comparing and contrasting two ranks.

This would make a great unit to be taught alongside a History unit on Anglo-Saxons, or as a way to revisit Historic knowledge.

This unit begins with ten lessons exploring the text type and sentence level work. The final five lessons allow them to write their information text. The unit uses three differentiated example text types about Anglo-Saxon society to supports students’ understanding.

Where appropriate, each lesson is differentiated and carefully planned to suit different students’ needs.

Lesson order:

• Hook lesson: introducing information texts, what they are and their purpose. Students read information texts with key information crossed out, allowing them to work out what the texts are about and reinforce the idea that information texts need to be clear for anyone to read.
• Key features, students highlight features in differentiated texts.
• Research Anglo-Saxon society, students will record what they find on mind maps. You will need access to topic books and/or the internet for this lesson.
• Answering questions about Anglo-Saxon society, students engage in a fun chatterbox activity to make sure they know everything about the ranks of Anglo-Saxon society they are researching.
• Tense, students explore the tense the texts are written in and practise writing in both the past and present tense.
• Writing with conjunctions, students will explore a range of conjunctions and their purposes to compare and contrast in the sample texts. They will then have time to write their own sentences comparing and contrasting using different conjunctions.
• Using appropriate language, students explore the tone of the sample texts and re-write very informal extracts.
• Relative clauses, explore how relative clauses are used and practise changing their position within a sentence. Students cut out main and relative clauses and arrange them to make the most effective sentences.
• Using parenthesis, students will look at how parenthesis has been used in the sample texts before practising writing their own sentences using parenthesis.
• Planning the information texts.
• Writing the text - the final five lessons give students chance to write their text looking back at the examples, modelling writing and editing what they have written.