A 3-week, fully resourced primary literacy unit based on The Weight of Water by Sarah Crossan. 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 sequence of five free-verse poems written from Kasienka’s perspective, charting her journey from arrival in Coventry to finding her own voice, followed by a descriptive narrative set in the swimming pool — the place she goes to escape — written in extended prose using semicolons to mark fluid boundaries between thought and sensation, and passive constructions to convey the feeling of being watched, judged and overlooked.

Grammar features (Year 6 NC-aligned)

• Semicolons to mark the boundary between independent clauses and between closely related images in free-verse poetry.
• The passive voice to shift focus from the doer of an action to the one being acted upon, creating a sense of powerlessness and surveillance.

Themes explored

Immigration and the experience of arrival, Identity, language and the right to be named correctly, Bullying, isolation and the small cruelties of school.

Key vocabulary

Displaced, invisible, fragmented, submerged, scrutinised, belonging, rendered, weightless.

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, Sarah Crossan, reading and writing, complete unit, differentiated, NC-aligned, lesson plans, resources, the weight of water