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Year 1 Model Text Resource Pack 20: Captain No-Beard’s Diary (Diary recount; geography)

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Real Writing
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Real Writing Year 1 - Unit 20
Model text: Captain No-Beard’s Diary, by Dan Smith
Curriculum links: Geography

Writing unit overview

This writing unit for Year 1 is built around an original text by Dan Smith - a fictional diary entry of a pirate. The example text is available as a PDF in three versions (plain, illustrated and annotated); annotated and non-annotated PowerPoint presentations are also included.

In this two-week unit, pupils will learn when capital letters should be used for proper nouns and the personal pronoun I, and will learn to read and spell the days of the week. For the final writing task, pupils will write their own diaries recounting the week of a pirate once they have explored the features of a diary entry. This unit could be used alongside work in geography, using geographical vocabulary to describe places, particularly coasts and oceans. It could also be used within a class topic of pirates.

Key curriculum skills

Four fully-resourced lessons are included for the following Year 1 English objectives, which can form part of the unit or be taught discretely:

1. Vocabulary: To read and spell words with the sound /v/ at the end of words

Pupils will: practise blending and segmenting words that contain the sound /v/ spelt ve at the end of words.

2. Vocabulary: To read and spell the days of the week.

Pupils will: read, spell and order the days of the week, learning that they need a capital letter as they are proper nouns.

3. Punctuation: To use capital letters for names of people, places and the pronoun ‘I’

Pupils will: learn that capital letters are needed for the names of people and places (proper nouns) and the personal pronoun ‘I’. They will proofread sentences, adding capital letters where they are needed, before writing about a journey at sea as a pirate, using capital letters correctly for names of people, places and the personal pronoun ‘I’.

4. Grammar: To sequence sentences

Pupils will: create simple story boards for a day of the week to show events that happen in ‘Captain No-Beard’s Diary’ by Dan Smith. They will learn how time adverbials can be used to help sequence events and will use their story board to orally compose sentences with simple time adverbials.

Additional objectives to teach or revisit:

  • saying out loud what they are going to write about
  • leaving spaces between words
  • using capital letters and full stops to punctuate sentences
  • using exclamation marks
  • using ‘and’ to join clauses
  • adding the suffix -ed where no change is needed to the root word
  • re-reading what they have written to check it makes sense
  • reading aloud their own writing

Year 1 vocabulary

Common exception words: I my me put do some love the they were so a to today here was are

Tier 2 words: captive, crew, cutlass, eyepatch, hook, parrot, skull, treasure
Tier 3 words: beach, coast, cove, jungle, mountain, ocean, sea, waves

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