About the author

Margaret Roberts is a Year 2 teacher at Heath Primary School in Chesterfield, who has contributed this resource as part of the 2006 Teachnet UK programme.

Using This Unit

This unit of work is made up of six one hour lessons which can be taught consecutively or in two sets of three lessons. The contents of the first three lessons are events which are familiar to the children. These lessons could form part of longer unit of work on this theme or they could be the introduction to a unit on story writing. This is how I have planned the lessons to be used. I have planned lesson one, two and three as an introduction to writing their own stories about familiar events, with stories about a character that children can relate to and images of children that can be used for discussion. These lessons lead on to work on traditional stories which are known to the children and then on to work on alternative traditional stories.  
Each lesson has a lesson plan, a PowerPoint presentation to share with the children showing learning objectives, activities and success criteria, and resources. It may also be necessary to plan additional extended writing time to give the children opportunity to complete their stories or write additional stories.

Resources
Two books are required to teach these lessons. These are:
Don’t Read This Book! by Bel Mooney
Princess Smartypants by Babette Cole

The lessons have been planned using these books; however other stories could be used if the lesson plans were adapted e.g. Clever Polly and the Stupid Wolf stories, My Naughty Little Sister stories and any alternative fairy stories.

Other resources need to teach these lessons have been provided in Word, PowerPoint and Textease format. But please note that the Textease files are unlikely to open in their native format until you download and save the whole resource to your local hard drive. Please click here to download and save the zipped Textease files to your local hard drive.

For people without access to Textease CT, a viewer (TeView) is available from the download section of the Softease website at http://www.softease.com where 30 day evaluation copies of the full Textease CT program are also available.

Phonics

The six phonic activities are planned using phonics from step six and step seven of the publication ‘Progression in Phonics’. These Textease activities are not planned to be used in place of the activities from this publication. They are planned to be used as additional resources. Any of them could be used in any lesson.  If each child was provided with phoneme cards the Textease activities could be used for assessment.

Speaking and Listening Activities

The S&L activities used in this unit are:
Talking Partners – pairs talk to each other for a given time to ask and/or answer questions, discuss topics given by the teacher and plan what they are going to write etc.

Think, Pair and Share – this is similar to talking partners except each child has a given time to think of their response before they turn to their partner and talk.

Fat Questions and Skinny Questions – this is a way of encouraging children to think about the questions they are asking. Skinny questions are questions like simple comprehension e.g. when did this story take place? They can be answered with one or two words. Fat questions are higher order questions that need a longer answer. Fat questions and skinny questions are based on the competences identified in Bloom’s Taxonomy.

Hot Seating – a child is chosen or volunteers to take on the role of a character and sits in the ‘hot seat’. The child then answers questions from the rest of the class in the role of the character. This activity can also be done in pairs with one child in the role of a character and the partner asking the questions or as a small group activity.

Conscience Alley / Thought Tunnel – again a child is chosen or volunteers to take on the role of a character and the rest of the class form two parallel lines facing each other. The ‘character’ then walks slowly between the lines while the rest of the class speak. This can be organised so that one line says something good about the character as they pass and one line says something critical about the character. The children can also ask questions to the character as they pass (which can be answered or not). This activity works better with year two children if they are given thinking time before the activity takes place and if the child taking on the role of a character is told that the rest of the class are talking to the character and not them.

Where This Unit Fits Into The New Primary Framework

This unit has been planned using The National Literacy Strategy but it could also be used when planning from the new Primary Framework. The objectives and activities could fit into strand nine which is called ‘Creating and shaping texts’ and the S&L activities could fit into strand one (speaking). Unit two (Y2) in the new Primary Framework also has resources that could be used with lesson four.