Falling Up | Year 2 English Unit | 15 Complete Lessons + Resources + Mark Scheme

A 3-week, fully resourced primary literacy unit based on Falling Up by Shel Silverstein. KS1 Poetry. National-Curriculum-aligned grammar, WT/ARE/GD differentiation, and ready to teach.

What’s inside

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, and reflection.
• 15 differentiated resource sheets — Working Towards, Age-Related Expectations, and Greater Depth, with sentence frames, word banks, and writing frames.
• Complete teacher unit plan — unit overview, key themes, model texts, full session-by-session plans, key questions, assessment focus, and vocabulary focus.
• Child-friendly mark scheme — “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 small collection of upside-down comic poems modelled on Shel Silverstein. Each poem flips one rule of the world (gravity, time, scale, weather) and uses past tense, expanded noun phrases for the new world, and exclamation marks for the silliest moments. The collection is presented as a child-illustrated mini-book that pupils read aloud at a class poetry cafe.

Grammar features (Year 2 NC-aligned)

• Past tense verbs (consistent simple past, including common irregular verbs).
• Subordination using the conjunctions ‘when’ and ‘because’.

Themes explored

Comic inversion — the world turned upside-down, The child voice and child-logic, Sound, rhythm and surprise endings.

Key vocabulary

Upside-down, inverted, gravity, rhyme, stanza, exclamation, comic, punchline.

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, poetry, Shel Silverstein, reading and writing, complete unit, differentiated, NC-aligned, lesson plans, resources, falling up