Explanation Text Writing Unit - Years 5 and 6

A fifteen-lesson writing unit, leading students towards writing their own explanation text based on a fictional product: telescopic glasses!
Students spend time at the start of the unit designing their own telescopic glasses. This allows them to focus on how to write an explanation text, without becoming bogged down in learning exactly how a specific product works, they can tell us!

This would make a great unit to be taught alongside a Science unit on Space, or as a way to revisit Scientific knowledge.

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

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

Lesson order:

• Hook lesson: introducing the telescopic glasses and their purpose. Students design their own telescopic glasses.
• Creating diagrams with technical language, students draw and label diagrams of their glasses using technical language.
• Identify features of explanation texts, students explore the key features of explanation texts and find examples in the texts provided.
• Using parenthesis, students will look at how parenthesis has been used in the sample texts before practising writing their own sentences using parenthesis.
• Using relative clauses, students will look at how relative clauses have been used in the sample texts before practising writing their own sentences or paragraphs using relative clauses to describe their glasses.
• Writing with conjunctions, students will explore a range of conjunctions and their different purposes in the sample texts. They will then have time to complete sentences or write their own sentences using conjunctions: comparing, contrasting, explaining and describing more than one.
• Using cohesive devices, students explore how repeated words/phrases, rhetorical questions and conjunctions are cohesive devices. Activities include highlighting cohesive devices in sample texts and editing paragraphs to make them more cohesive.