A 3-week, fully resourced primary literacy unit based on Shackleton’s Journey by William Grill. KS2 Non-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.

• 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 newspaper report about the events of Shackleton’s Endurance expedition, written in role as a journalist and using fronted adverbials, direct speech with inverted commas, sub-headings and quotations from the press-conference interview notes.

Grammar features (Year 4 NC-aligned)

• Noun phrases expanded by the addition of modifying adjectives, nouns and preposition phrases (e.g. the still, remote sea of emptiness under the enchanting cliffs).
• Fronted adverbials of time and place, with a comma after the fronted adverbial (e.g. At dusk, the wind roared deafeningly across the Southern Ocean).

Themes explored

Taking Courage, Companionship and resilience, Adventure and exploration, Determination against the odds, Journeys and Discoveries.

Key vocabulary

Adventurous, courageous, gregarious, humorous, perilous, arduous, barren, endurance.

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

Tags

KS2, Year 4, English, non-fiction, William Grill, reading and writing, complete unit, differentiated, NC-aligned, lesson plans, resources, shackleton’s journey