Summer brings holidays, day trips and family adventures, which makes it the perfect time to teach pupils how to write recounts. With this KS1 resource pack, you can guide children to capture real or imagined summer experiences while building confidence in writing about events.
At the heart of the pack is a WAGOLL model text, Fun on the Pier! The text follows a family as they walk along the pier, enjoy drinks at the café, ride the rollercoaster, play on the beach and eat fish and chips before heading home.
Pupils can see how time adverbials such as first, next and finally help to sequence events, and they can identify past tense verbs, including those ending in -ed as well as irregular forms like went and got.
The activities in the teaching notes give you a clear route through the unit. You start by reading and discussing the WAGOLL, asking questions about what the writer saw, felt and did. Pupils then explore the past tense in detail, practising adding the suffix -ed to verbs and identifying irregular forms.
With the planning sheet, children can order the events they want to include and orally rehearse their sentences before writing. The pack also encourages discussion around coastal images, helping pupils gather ideas for recounts of both real and imagined trips.
To extend learning, pupils can use themed writing paper to create their final recount, linking sentences with time adverbials. Support is available through simple sentence tasks, while challenges include identifying and using adverbs for sequencing.
You can also adapt the resource to recount other school or family events, making it flexible beyond the seaside theme.
What’s included in the pack
- Model text – Fun on the Pier! (WAGOLL)
- PDF images of summer trips and coastal features
- Recount planning sheet
- Themed writing paper
- Detailed teaching notes with step-by-step activities
Curriculum links
The pack helps you meet KS1 English writing objectives. Pupils will:
- write about real events to develop stamina and positive attitudes to writing
- plan what they want to write by saying ideas out loud or sequencing them first
- use the past tense correctly and consistently
- apply knowledge of suffixes, especially -ed, to form verbs in the past tense
This summer writing pack gives you everything you need to make recount writing engaging, practical and purposeful.
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