'The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas' Year 6 Guided Reading Unit

A full guided reading unit of six lessons based on the fantastic child-friendly version of the short story ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas’ by Ursula Le Guin. This unit will be sure to improve your class’ vocabulary, as well as make them think about whether the suffering of one person is ever worth it for the happiness of many.

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 the story.

Lesson 2: The pupils will gather the description of the city and use this to draw their own picture of Omelas and using quotations from the text to describe their drawing.

Lesson 3: In this lesson, the class will read more of the story and use this as a base for their predictions now they know more about the mysterious city of Omelas. These predictions will be revisited in lesson 6.

Lesson 4: In this lesson we discover the city’s dark secret and infer the emotions and describe the appearance of the characters using the text to support ideas.

Lesson 5: We read more of the story and answer questions on the text. Pupils will need to infer from the story and give their own opinions. For less-able pupils a scaffolded answer sheet is provided so they can access the lesson.

Lesson 6: In the final lesson the pupils will have to think about whether they would walk away from Omelas or live with the guilt of the child’s suffering. They will then have to look back to their predictions from lesson 3, and compare these predictions with what happened.

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.