English - Historical Stories and report writing (Year 6)

This is the full 15 lesson, unit of work for historical writing. One of the free lessons from this unit is found here: https://www.tes.com/teaching-resource/war-horse-anachronims-and-historical-research-lesson-12202278

The unit contains a focus on the study and use of historical stories through World War One as a cross curricular approach to teaching English with History and Drama.

We use War Horse as inspiration for work to developing characters, identifying different sentence types whilst becoming familiar with vocabulary from the time period through research based lessons. The aim of these lessons is to compare the book with other adaptations of War Horse before attempting to write their own screenplay of a scene, adapted for their purpose with appropriate dialogue for their chosen scene.

War Game and One Boy’s War are included to add further insight from a soldier’s perspective with a focus on creating an understanding of the realism of war and for children to appreciate the horrors, squalid conditions and misleading nature of the war that they joined (some rather enthusiastically). Children shall use research skills to discover the true nature of the trenches that soldiers fought in and create a letter home as a soldier to a friend who may be considering enlisting. In this letter they shall have to decide whether they would encourage or discourage their friend from enlisting. Finally, the audience and purpose for their writing shall change from informal to formal, where they write a historically accurate piece for an exhibition.

All necessary resources are included as well as additional tasks based around War Horse for children to complete as homework if they have access to the book at home.