'Aesop's Fables' Year 2 English Unit of Work

Based around the book ‘Aesop’s Fables’ by Michael Morpurgo, this 12 lesson English Unit of Work covers Year 2 National Curriculum Objectives for S & L, Reading, Grammar and Spelling and Composition. The unit includes editable planning documents, worksheets, display vocabulary, writing frames and much more.  End of unit ‘Fable Writing’.

Unit overview:

In this unit, children will be ‘hooked in’ with a challenging activity, learning the moral ‘Where there’s a will, there’s a way!’ The children will then be introduced to the text ‘Aesop’s Fables’. Through shared reading lessons, children will analyse fables and identify the main features. Children will be taught how to make simple predictions about fables based on the morals provided. Hot seating activities will encourage children to make simple inferences about character’s feelings and emotions.  Children will then use story maps to retell familiar fables in their own words. Grammar lessons include the use of subordination, expanded noun phrases and question sentences. The final piece of writing involves planning and writing for their own fable, this includes shared planning, drafting and editing lessons. Children will create their own ‘fable’ booklet to be displayed in the classroom library.

Reading Objectives:

• Becoming increasingly familiar with and retelling a wider range of stories, fairy stories and traditional tales.
• Predicting what might happen on the basis of what has been read so far.
• Making inferences on the basis of what is being said and done.

Speaking and Listening Objectives:

• Participate in discussions, presentations, performances, role play, improvisations and debates.
• Consider and evaluate different viewpoints, attending to and building on the contributions of others.

Grammar Objectives:

• Subordination (using when, if, that, because)
• Expanded noun phrases for description and specification.
• How the grammatical patterns in a sentence indicate its function as a question.

Writing Objectives:

• Discussing writing similar to that which they are planning to write in order to understand and learn from its structure, vocabulary and grammar.
• In narratives, creating settings, characters and plot.
• Use of paragraphs to organise ideas around a theme.Proof-read for spelling and punctuation errors.

Zip file includes:

Editable Lesson Planning (Microsoft Word)
Writing frame (PDF)
Character Masks (PDF)
Expanded Noun Phrases Worksheets (PDF)
Fables Display Banner (PDF)
Fables Display Vocabulary (PDF)
Fables Story Maps (PDF)
Features of a Fable Worksheet (PDF)
Hot seat Inference Questions (PDF)
List of Morals and Animals (PDF)
Making Predictions Worksheet (PDF)
Morals (PDF)
Planning a Fable (PDF)
Questions From Fables (PDF)
Questions Worksheet (PDF)
Subordinating Conjunctions Worksheets (PDF)
The Hare and the Tortoise Fable Presentation (PDF)
The Lion and the Mouse Fable ‘Features’ (PDF)
‘What are Fables?’ Presentation (PDF)