'An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge' Year 6 Guided Reading Unit

A whole-class guided reading unit of eight lessons based on the brilliant short story ‘An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge’ by Ambrose Bierce. This is a perfect fiction unit of guided reading lessons aimed at Year 6 pupils.

Lesson 1: Like all the guided reading planning on Class Helper, the first lesson is a knowledge harvest. In this lesson the pupils will mindmap their associations with the words in the title before making initial predictions of what will happen in the story.

Lesson 2: In this lesson we are shown the opening scene of the story, with the main character about to be hanged from the side of a bridge, for crimes we haven’t yet discovered. Pupils will note down everything they know so far from this extract, giving them a firm understanding of the setting and prompting them to make predictions.

Lesson 3: Pupils will answer retrieval questions on the text, using P.E.E. (point, evidence, explain) that is introduced in this lesson. Learning and practising P.E.E. is a useful skill, not just for answering guided reading questions, or for SATs questions, but is a great skill to hone for writing essays and forming strong paragraphs. For a display poster that works alongside this lesson, click here.

Lesson 4: The class will discover the crime that Peyton Fahrquhar committed and describe and contrast the emotions of the main character between the flashback and him standing on the bridge, awaiting his punishment.

Lesson 5: We read more of the story and see how Peyton falls to his death, but at the last second, the rope breaks and he falls into the water below. The pupils will underline and annotate the text and then use this information to draw a picture of the main character in the water now he’s miraculously saved.

Lesson 6: In this lesson, pupils will underline the adjectives used in the text and use thesauruses to find synonyms and antonyms of these words.

Lesson 7: Peyton has managed to get free of the noose and is swimming away from the bridge as cannons and rifles hit the water around him. The class will take this tension-filled moment to consider the character’s thoughts and emotions by hot-seating the character.

Lesson 8: The final lesson will see one of the greatest twists in fiction. The main character reaches his home, and is about to embrace his wife, when a sudden darkness hits him, and we realise he was only imagining his escape while falling from the bridge. The class will plot his emotions onto a graph (worksheet provided with the download) and explain why they have made their choices.

The download includes fully editable Word document success criteria for every lesson, text extracts for each lesson, PowerPoints and a unit plan for guidance, along with display items you can put on your guided reading board.