This is a sequence of English writing lessons that I did with my year 6 class based on the book ‘Otto the autobiography of a teddy bear’ by Tomi Ungerer. The writing sequence could last for 2-3 weeks or longer. The unit finishes with the class writing a newspaper article. All the lessons before that build up towards writing a newspaper article. We looked at parenthesis, direct and reported speech, analysing features of newspaper articles, looking at witness quotations with drama. On Word documents, I have included examples of newspaper articles to analyse, the plans we used, a model of the final newspaper article which the teacher can use when doing Shared writing and a template for them to write their final edited piece on. I have also included a newspaper article which is biased and the author is sceptical about whether the events are true or not. I got my higher writers to analyse this and then finally got them to write their article biased as an extra challenge. Please read the notes on the PowerPoint slides so extra suggestions.

This is a reading unit that I did with my year 6 class over the course of a half term. We would roughly do a lesson in the books every other day and read a chapter a day. Most of the lessons are differentiated for LA, MA and HA.

These are reading comprehensions which I gave my year 6 class with the answers. The questions are about chapters 1 and 2. Firstly, to encourage them to read the actual book which we have in our class library. Also to practise retrieval, inference, explanation and justifying their opinions with evidence from the text questions, all geared towards the SATs. The answers are at the end of the document.

This is a non-fiction reading comprehension that I gave my year 6 class for homework based on the famous, record-breaking singer Beyoncé. It inludes the text, questions and answers. The comprehension has 9 questions that are suitable for your LA, MA and HA children. The questions involve a mixture of skills such as retrieval, inference, explanation and vocabulary skills. I have included the answers at the end of the Word document.