A 3-week, fully resourced primary literacy unit based on Private Peaceful by Michael Morpurgo. KS2 Fiction. National-Curriculum-aligned grammar, WT/ARE/GD differentiation, and ready to teach.

What’s inside

This complete English unit gives you everything for three weeks of high-quality teaching, designed to match the standard of leading primary schemes (Literacy Tree, Write Stuff, Power of Reading).

• 15 lesson PowerPoints — illustrated cover slides, success criteria, vocabulary previews, modelled writing, “big questions” (Bloom’s-laddered), differentiation tiers, plenary, and reflection.
• 15 differentiated resource sheets — Working Towards, Age-Related Expectations, and Greater Depth, with sentence frames, word banks, and writing frames.
• Complete teacher unit plan — unit overview, key themes, model texts, full session-by-session plans, key questions, assessment focus, and vocabulary focus.
• Child-friendly mark scheme — “I can…” success criteria for the final writing piece, ready for self- and peer-assessment.
• 3 weekly exit tickets — 5 multiple-choice questions per week, with teacher answer keys.

Final writing outcome

A dual-outcome unit: (1) a first-person World War One retrospective narrative written as Tommo, reflecting on his brother Charlie’s life, sacrifice and execution, using the subjunctive mood for regret and longing; (2) a formal letter of protest to a government minister arguing for Charlie’s posthumous pardon, deploying passive voice constructions, the subjunctive for hypothetical alternatives, and semi-colons for complex contrasting clauses.

Grammar features (Year 6 NC-aligned)

• Subjunctive mood — expressing wishes, regrets and hypothetical conditions (e.g. ‘If only Charlie were still here’; ‘I wish it were possible to undo what was done’).
• Passive voice for formal register and deliberate distancing of agency in the formal letter (e.g. ‘It is submitted that the law was wrongly applied’; ‘Charlie Peaceful was denied the right to a fair hearing’).

Themes explored

Sacrifice and selfless love between brothers, The injustice of military law and the execution of soldiers for cowardice, Brotherhood, loyalty and the bonds forged in war, The human cost of the Western Front, Memory, grief and the power of retrospective storytelling.

Key vocabulary

Retrospective, injustice, subjunctive, passive, posthumous, cowardice, tribunal, pardon.

Format & compatibility

• Editable PowerPoint (.pptx) and Word (.docx) files.
• UK English spelling.
• One printer-friendly A4 page per resource sheet.
• Compatible with Literacy Tree, Write Stuff, and Power of Reading planning approaches.

Year groups & key stage

• Year 6 (KS2).
• 15 sessions over 3 weeks (≈45–60 minutes per lesson).

Tags

KS2, Year 6, English, fiction, Michael Morpurgo, reading and writing, complete unit, differentiated, NC-aligned, lesson plans, resources, private peaceful