KS2 Writing Unit - Biography - Year 3, 4, 5, 6

A fully planned, 2-week unit for writing a biography - WAGOLL uses Astronaut Chris Hadfield. The final outcome is for children to write a biography of their own - we based ours on the talking horse in the novel There May be a Castle (as this was our class novel - it’s brilliant!) but this could be tailored to your classes needs.

Resources include a Smart Notebook file which follows the read as a reader/writer approach to analyse the biography WAGOLL in detail, line by line. The file also includes some lesson starters and writing prompts but again these could/should be tailored to the needs of your class.

Also included is a biography WAGOLL that was used as our oral text (learning actions and creating a story map), a boxing up activity, cloze activities for each paragraph and my planning (though it was very near to SATs when I did this one!) - plus, everything is editable to match the needs of your class!

This was used with Year 6 but would be ideal for KS2 and KS3. Boys and girls were engaged and this led to some excellent writing outcomes (for something children traditional find difficult to nail) assessed against the writing assessment framework.

We were inspired to look in more detail at Astronaut Hadfield, watching his music and experiment videos on YouTube and even using a picture book he has written (The Darkest Dark) in guided reading.