A 3-week, fully resourced primary literacy unit based on The Arrival by Shaun Tan. 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 descriptive recount written from the perspective of the migrant father, describing his first day exploring the strange ‘New World’ city — its unfamiliar creatures, towering architecture and bewildering customs. Pupils use parenthesis (dashes, brackets and commas) to show the character’s confusion and relative clauses to specify the strange creatures he encounters.

Grammar features (Year 5 NC-aligned)

• Relative clauses using relative pronouns (who, which, that, whose, where).
• Parenthesis using brackets, dashes and commas.

Themes explored

Migration and belonging, the unknown and the unfamiliar, hope and family.

Key vocabulary

Migrant, bewildering, unfamiliar, translate, threshold, labyrinthine, alien, tentative.

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

Tags

KS2, Year 5, English, fiction, Shaun Tan, reading and writing, complete unit, differentiated, NC-aligned, lesson plans, resources, the arrival