Long Way Down | Year 6 English Unit | 15 Complete Lessons + Resources + Mark Scheme

A 3-week, fully resourced primary literacy unit based on Long Way Down by Jason Reynolds. KS2 Fiction. 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 two-part final piece: a suspenseful narrative recounting the sixty-second elevator ride from the seventh floor to the ground floor — each floor a passenger, each passenger a memory — followed by a formal speech entitled ‘Choices’ to be delivered at a community assembly, arguing that the cycle of violence is broken only by the moment one person decides differently.

Grammar features (Year 6 NC-aligned)

• The passive voice to depersonalise rules and inherited codes (Y6 NC: use the passive to affect the presentation of information in a sentence).
• Colons to introduce explanations, lists and — uniquely in this unit — characters: each ghost named after a colon (Y6 NC: use of the colon to introduce a list, and use of semi-colons to mark boundaries between independent clauses).

Themes explored

Justice and revenge, The cycle of violence, Decision-making and personal agency, Grief, memory and inheritance.

Key vocabulary

Vengeance, inheritance, cycle, verdict, restraint, consequence, ascent, reckoning.

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 6 (KS2).
• 15 sessions over 3 weeks (≈45–60 minutes per lesson).

Tags

KS2, Year 6, English, fiction, Jason Reynolds, reading and writing, complete unit, differentiated, NC-aligned, lesson plans, resources, long way down