A River | Year 2 English Unit | 15 Complete Lessons + Resources + Marking Scheme

A 3-week, fully resourced primary literacy unit based on A River by Marc Martin. KS1 Fiction. National-Curriculum-aligned grammar, WT/ARE/GD differentiation, and ready to teach.

What’s inside (35 files)

This complete English unit gives you everything for three weeks of high-quality teaching, designed to match the standard of leading primary schemes (Literacy Tree, Write Stuff, Power of Reading).

15 lesson PowerPoints — illustrated cover slides, success criteria, vocabulary previews, modelled writing, “big questions” (Bloom’s-laddered), differentiation tiers, plenary, reflection
15 differentiated resource sheets — Working Towards / Age-Related Expectations / Greater Depth, with sentence frames, word banks, writing frames
Complete teacher unit plan — unit overview, key themes, model texts (WT/ARE/GD), full session-by-session plans, key questions, assessment focus, vocabulary focus
Child-friendly marking rubric — “I can…” success criteria for the final writing piece, ready for self- and peer-assessment
3 weekly exit tickets — 5 multiple-choice questions per week with teacher answer keys

Final writing outcome

A descriptive journey poem and a travel journal that follow a river from a city window all the way to the sea, using expanded noun phrases to paint each landscape and ‘when’ clauses to link moments of imagined travel.

Grammar features (Year 2 NC-aligned)

• Expanded noun phrases for description (adjective, adjective, noun)
• Subordination using the conjunction ‘when’

Themes explored

Nature, journey, imagination

Format & compatibility

• Editable PowerPoint (.pptx) and Word (.docx) files
• UK English spelling
• One printer-friendly A4 page per resource sheet
• Compatible with Literacy Tree, Write Stuff, and Power of Reading planning approaches

Year groups & key stage

• Year 2 (KS1)
• 15 sessions over 3 weeks (≈45–60 minutes per lesson)

Tags

KS1, Year 2, English, fiction, Marc Martin, reading and writing, complete unit, differentiated, NC-aligned, lesson plans, resources, a river