The Rhythm of the Rain Planning | Year 3 and 4 English Unit | 15 Lessons

Made by a teacher, who still teaches (and uses these plans!)

The Rhythm of the Rain planning for Year 3 and 4: a complete 15-lesson English unit with PowerPoints, plans and worksheets, plus water cycle science links.
Issac empties his jar of water into his favourite pool and wonders where it will go. Grahame Baker-Smith’s non-fiction picture book follows that water down rivers, into a storm, up into the clouds and across the world, before it returns to Issac’s pool. This book-led unit opens with a body-percussion rainstorm and ends with every pupil publishing a circular water journey as a fold-out loop book.

What’s inside
• 15 fully resourced lessons, each about an hour, with a learning objective and success criteria
• 15 PowerPoint presentations built around the book’s spreads, with Show Me tasks, modelled writing and hinge questions
• 15 detailed three-page teacher plans (PDF) with a 60-minute timeline and step-by-step guidance
• Worksheets for every lesson: core and supported versions, in colour and black and white
• Exemplars, assessment guidance, adaptive teaching notes and checked science facts with sources
• A Printables and Working Wall pack, with conductor cards, fact cards, an A3 river map, kenning riddles, weather cards, a loop-book template and 24 posters
• A one-page unit map with National Curriculum links

Skills taught
• Reading: fiction and non-fiction, quoting evidence, inference from pictures, retrieval and structure
• Spelling: y as i, ou as u, sc as s, inter-, ch as k and dictionary skills
• Grammar: personification, kennings and hyphens, possessive pronouns, its and it’s, the ellipsis and tense choices
• Writing: a setting, captions, kennings, a glossary, a weather forecast, a performance poem and a published water journey
• Science links: evaporation, condensation and the water cycle

Highlights
• Make a Rainstorm: the class rubs, clicks, pats and stomps a rainstorm into life
• The Sweating Glass: pupils discover condensation before writing a glossary
• Atlas Detectives: pupils track the cloud, then present a TV weather forecast
• The Rain Gallery: loop books are read aloud from the Author’s Chair

Who it is for
Lower KS2 classes in Year 3, Year 4 or mixed Year 3/4, following the National Curriculum for English, with links to Year 4 science.

Try it first: Lesson 1, Listen to the Rain, is free. The Rhythm of the Rain Free Lesson 1 | Year 3 and 4 English

Save with the bundle: Cloud Tea Monkeys and Rhythm of the Rain | Y3/4 Bundle

You will need the book: The Rhythm of the Rain by Grahame Baker-Smith. We strongly recommend having a copy in your classroom.