Sing Down the Moon | Year 5 English Unit

A 3-week, fully resourced primary literacy unit based on Sing Down the Moon by Scott O’Dell. 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 the National Curriculum for English at KS1 and KS2.

• 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 historical narrative recounting a single, pivotal day from the Long Walk of 1864, told in the first person by Bright Morning, a fourteen-year-old Navajo girl. The narrative blends sensory description of the high desert with the inner thoughts of a young woman who has lost her home, her sheep and her belief that the world is safe. Pupils sustain tense and viewpoint across three to four paragraphs and use relative clauses, modal verbs and dashes for parenthesis to layer their writing.

Grammar features (Year 5 NC-aligned)

• Relative clauses using relative pronouns (who, which, that, whose, where) to add information about a noun without starting a new sentence.
• Modal verbs (could, would, should, might, must, may) to express degrees of possibility, obligation and survival.

Themes explored