This resource offers a 1-week Year 1 English MTP (Medium Term Plan) based on the narrative text “Blue Penguin” by Petr Horacek. This plan is designed to entertain students, guiding them to write sentences that describe the beginning, middle, and end of a story, culminating in a retell for the Reading Area.
What’s Included?
The plan features a variety of suggested activities for reading and writing, with a strong focus on inference, learning VIP words, and building background knowledge about the North and South Poles.

Explore and Immerse: Students will have the opportunity to explore atlases, make penguins, and read a range of Arctic and Antarctica stories. The immersion phase also suggests sharing books by Judith Kerr, acting out the story through drama, and making story maps to sequence events.

Develop Reading Skills: To build reading fluency, pupils will match phonetically decodable words and captions to pictures, and practice prosody aloud as a group. They will also visualize what they are reading by drawing or acting it out.

Focus on Grammar & Phonics: Foundational grammar is heavily supported through explicit activities, such as sorting “s” and “es” plural words, playing games linked to “ing” and “ed” endings, and rehearsing the use of capital letters and full stops in simple sentences. Pupils will also practice composing sentences orally before writing them down.

The resource includes a detailed Marking Ladder to assess skills such as using four graphemes to sound out words, linking ideas using the word “and,” and correctly applying the suffix “ed” when writing in the past tense. Furthermore, it provides specific Tier 2 vocabulary words—such as “penguin,” “lonely,” “ocean,” and “horizon”—alongside a curated list of supplementary reading texts like Lost and Found and The Emperor’s Egg. This plan is a wonderful tool for teachers seeking to develop early narrative writing and reading comprehension through an engaging polar-themed story.