Year 1 English Unit Plan Toby and the Great Fire of London (Margaret Nash)
This resource offers a comprehensive 2-week Year 1 English MTP (Medium Term Plan) centered around the historical narrative “Toby and The Great Fire of London” by Margaret Nash. This unit is designed to teach students how to write to inform, culminating in an independent outcome where they write a first-person diary entry from the perspective of the character Toby to describe the Great Fire of London.
What’s Included?
The plan details a variety of engaging activities for reading and writing, with a strong focus on making predictions, asking questions, and developing inference skills. Students will have the opportunity to immerse themselves in the Great Fire of London by exploring non-fiction texts, engaging in role-play with puppets, reading clues to match characters, and revisiting Samuel Pepys’s famous diary. To build reading comprehension, pupils will participate in freeze frames from the story to write questions and use story maps with missing parts to predict what will happen next.
In their writing journey, pupils will practice sequencing events from the story and writing thought bubbles to match characters before tackling their diary entries. The plan heavily supports foundational grammar and phonics, featuring activities designed to teach the use of the suffix ‘ed’ for past tense, the prefix ‘un’, and the correct usage of question marks. Students will also practice extending their ideas by matching chopped-up sentences, focusing on using “and” or “because” as linking words.
The resource includes a detailed Marking Ladder to assess skills such as using five graphemes to sound out words, using capital letters for proper nouns, and independently checking that their writing makes sense. Furthermore, it provides a specific Tier 2 vocabulary list—featuring words like “foolish,” “breeze,” “spreading,” “pit,” and “distance”—alongside a curated list of supplementary reading texts such as The Great Fire of London: Samuel’s Story and The Danger Zone - Avoid being in the GFL!. This plan is a fantastic tool for teachers seeking to seamlessly blend history and literacy while developing early diary-writing skills.




















