Fantastically Great Women Writing Unit

A three or four week writing unit based around the books ‘Fantastically Great Women who Changed the World’ and ‘Fantastically Great Women who Saved the Planet’ by Kate Pankhurst.

The writing outcome is a Biography with a range of sentence structures and cohesive devices. The sentence structures are differentiated by ability group:
Consolidate: Coordinating conjunctions.
Core: Subordination.
Extend: Relative clauses.

This unit was originally taught to Year 5 but it could easily be used from Year 2 - 6, due to the accessible nature of the original books and the grammar covered. We also used supporting material from ‘What Would she do? Real-life Stories of 25 Rebel Women’ by Kay Woodward and other books of a similar theme.

This is a brilliant unit that has so many opportunities for discussion about racial and gender equality and women’s rights.