Years 3 and 4 Persuasive Letter - Shorter School Week

A detailed and engaging fifteen-lesson writing unit, guiding learners towards writing a persuasive letter, convincing their headteacher to change the school week to four days. Throughout the unit, students read and refer to differentiated example texts to support their learning and understanding of what a persuasive letter is. The first ten lessons explore the text type and sentence level work. The final five lessons allow time to write the persuasive letter, one step at a time.

Where appropriate, each lesson is differentiated and carefully planned to suit different students’ needs. Answers (or example answers) are provided, where appropriate.

Lesson order:
• Hook lesson: students will be given the chance to practise persuading each other to do simple tasks to understand what persuasion is. They will then read the example text, ending the lesson by exploring pros and cons for the idea of a four-day school week.
• Identifying the key features of a persuasive letter, sorting and highlighting the features.
• Speaking and listening lesson on exaggerating, students will explore what it means to exaggerate, and the language features used. Then practise exaggerating different reasons for having a four-day school week in pairs or groups.
• Power of three, students learn what the power of three is, how it is used in the example texts and practise using it.
• Talking directly to the reader using first and second person pronouns, students learn what first and second person pronouns are using a snap game. The independent activities include finding pronouns in the example texts, creating a word mat and re-writing sentences using incorrect pronouns.
• Writing opinions as facts. Students learn the effect of writing opinions as facts to be persuasive and have the chance to practise writing some.
• Fact finding lesson to create simple statistics, students create questions and poll class/staff members to create their own simple statistics for their letters.
• Conjunctions to extend ideas, students explore how different conjunctions are used before the main activity, a matching card game where students need to match two parts of a sentence with a conjunction.
• Understanding what rhetorical questions are and how they are used in persuasive letters, students either fill in the blank on an example text with rhetorical questions or create a word mat for rhetorical questions.
• Planning our persuasive letter.
• Writing the introduction and first paragraph, looking at examples and exploring the language used.
• Writing the third paragraph, shared write to support students writing.
• Writing the conclusion.
• Students can practise editing using our ‘persuasive letter to edit’ before editing their own work.
• Publishing texts.