Year 5 English (Reading & Writing)

Students will engage in a comprehensive exploration of texts, emphasising reading comprehension, critical thinking and effective writing. The course integrates diverse genres to provide a dynamic and enriching learning experience. This course is tailored to prepare students for the Selective High Schools Placement Test as well as scholarship tests.

Course objectives

* Apply advanced reading comprehension strategies to interpret and analyse diverse texts independently
* Demonstrate creativity and clarity in a range of text types including narrative, descriptive, informative and persuasive writing
* Develop critical thinking skills through literary analysis, inference and interpretation of texts

Teaching plan

Vocabulary is included in most weeks. Homework includes a writing task that is teacher-marked, and other activities that are self-marked. There is no homework in week 10.

Week 1: Inferencing emotions, narrative plot structure: Freytag’s Pyramid, narrative hooks, text analysis, paired texts comprehension

Week 2: Linked extracts, narrative focus: the unreliable narrator, reading comprehension, text analysis

Week 3: Identifying the main idea, cloze – subheadings and sentence gap-match, persuasive writing structure, writing objective arguments

Week 4: Reviews: structure, compare-and-contrast text analysis, linked extracts, cloze – subheadings and sentence gap-match

Week 5: Poetry: sensory imagery, poetry comprehension, personal recount, text analysis

Week 6: Word fill-in-the-blanks, linked extracts, narrative setting, narrative orientation, sensory imagery, text analysis

Week 7: Word fill-in-the-blanks, poetry comprehension, linked extracts, formal letter, refutation, text analysis

Week 8: Literary techniques & devices, tone, poetry comprehension, persuasive writing: triangle of rhetoric, advertisements, compare-and-contrast text analysis

Week 9: Reading and writing assessments & review

Week 10: Idioms & other vocabulary fun, identifying the moral of a story, differentiating between theme and moral, text analysis