Year 2/3 Mixed Age English Planning
Choose the block you wish to teach
We’ve been busy spring cleaning our poetry blocks.
Our revised summer poetry blocks should be on the site in May, the autumn ones in July, and the spring ones in September.
Autumn Blocks
Explore features of traditional tales and answer comprehension questions using A Year Full of Stories and Starbird. Investigate different forms of the past tense and learn to wrote expanded noun phrases. Plan and write your own stories featuring a 'star creature' and different story locations.

Traditional Tales: Around the World
Enjoy two books featuring the 1969 moon landings, The Sea of Tranquility by Mark Haddon and The Darkest Dark by astronaut Chris Hadfield. Compose chronological reports about Apollo 11's mission. Plan and write recounts and fact files about dream jobs. Explore subordinating conjunctions and common prefixes.

Recounts: Space Travellers
Explore a selection of poems from the wonderful collection, The Proper Way to Meet a Hedgehog. Study poetic form and devices and create new poems inspired by those read. Grammar includes extending sentences and understanding and punctuating different types of sentence.

Poems on a Theme: How to Poems
Enjoy using The Night Gardener as inspiration for descriptive writing. Create instructions for planting seeds based on The Girl Who Planted Trees. Explore past and present tense and learn about contractions and possessive apostrophes. Share The Woman Who Turned Children Into Birds and write an imaginative recount of a day as a bird.

Stories on a Theme: Nature
Think like a scientist with this exciting block focusing on instructions and explanations. Meet Ada Twist, Scientist, and follow her lead by carrying out an experiment, writing instructions for others and explaining how things work. Learn about sentence types and conjunctions along the way.

Instructions and Explanations: Ada Twist, Scientist
Spring Blocks
Enjoy reading stories about Anna Hibiscus and her family and jump into the exciting world of the No. 1 Car Spotter. Learn about verb tenses, punctuating dialogue and bring it all together to write a short story of your own.

Stories by the Same Author: Atinuke
Using Darwin's Super-Pooping Worm Spectacular, Polly Owen and Moth: An Evolution Story, Isabel Thomas find out more about animal adaptations.

Information Texts: Adaptation
Discover the beautiful poetry of Zaro Weil and enjoy responding to and writing poetry, learning poetic terms along the way. Explore word classes and write instructions for growing beans. End the block by writing an adventure story inspired by the poems studied.

Poems by the Same Poet: Zaro Weil
Spark important conversations about emotions with a selection of stories about feeling angry: The Day No One Was Angry, Angry Arthur and The Tunnel. Learn how to correctly punctuate dialogue, use prepositions to add information before ending the block by writing a short story.

Stories on a Theme: Feeling Angry
Take inspiration from the remarkable people featured in this block: Marcus Rashford, Malala Yousafzai and Greta Thunberg, among others. Study the features of biographical and autobiographical texts and research and write a short biography.

Biographies: Inspirational People
Summer Blocks
Explore the excitement of Roz's adventures in The Wild Robot through comprehension activities, writing diary entries and describing settings. Grammar work focuses on expanded noun phrases and punctuating dialogue.

Adventure Stories: Wild Robot
Explore the solar system with Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock's Am I Made of Stardust? Create interactive booklets and explain what it's like to be in space. Grammar includes using paragraphs and conjunctions.

Explanations: Space
Read and enjoy a wonderful selection of classic poems; discuss poetic features, investigate language and prepare a performance. Grammar includes sentence forms and expressing time, place and cause.

Poetry: Classic Poetry
Explore a selection of books about the transformative power of hope and kindness. Be inspired by the wonderful stories to write a story of their own. Grammar includes punctuating dialogue and verb tenses.

Stories on a Theme: Hope
Study the language and layout of information texts using Katie Daynes' Can we Really Help the Planet? Learn how we can help the planet and write to persuade others to make changes too. Grammar includes using apostrophes and sentence types.

Reports: Helping the Planet
Using Joseph Coelho's wonderful poetry collection Courage Out Loud, explore a range of poetic techniques and devices. Prepare a poetry performance for an audience and write poetry about overcoming a challenge.
