This resource offers a 1-week Year 1 English MTP (Medium Term Plan) based on the text “Who Lives Here? Polar Animals” by Deborah Hodge. This plan is designed to help students write to inform, culminating in the creation of an information text about Polar Animals, alongside sentences to match the main parts of a story for a reading area retell.

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 linking reading to background knowledge about the North and South Poles. Students will have the opportunity to explore atlases, make penguins, and practice prosody aloud as a group to build reading fluency. The immersion phase also suggests sharing a range of books by Judith Kerr, making story maps, and acting out stories through drama and role-play.

In their writing journey, pupils will sequence events, match phonetically decodable words and captions to pictures, and practice composing a sentence orally before writing it down. Foundational grammar and phonics are heavily supported, with explicit activities focusing on sorting ‘s’ and ‘es’ plural words, playing games linked to ‘ing’ and ‘ed’ endings, and correctly using the suffix ‘ed’ when writing in the past tense.

The resource also includes a detailed Marking Ladder to assess skills such as using four graphemes to sound out words, accurately using capital letters and full stops, and linking ideas using the word “and”. Furthermore, it provides specific Tier 2 vocabulary words—such as “penguin,” “ocean,” “horizon,” and “rescue”—alongside a curated list of supplementary reading texts like The Emperor’s Egg and Lost and Found. This plan is a wonderful tool for teachers seeking to develop early information writing and reading comprehension through an engaging, chilly topic.