Primary National Strategy: Frameworks review

Learning objectives | Planning | Assessment

Foundation | Year 1 | Year 2 | Year 3 | Year 4 | Year 5 | Year 6

Rationale for planning For each year group, there are specified learning objectives within all twelve literacy strands. These objectives, together with the yearly overviews of literacy learning which give a descriptive summary of the literacy learning for that year, provide the content for literacy learning and teaching. The purpose of long-term planning is to create an outline structure to support the planning of teaching and learning against these objectives across a year. The exemplified long term plan in the renewed Framework starts by clustering objectives in the Framework into the three major themes – narrative (and plays), non-fiction and poetry. Each of these themes forms a 'block' in the medium-term planning.
Narrative		Non-fiction		Poetry
Each of these blocks has then been divided into a number of units. Each unit is made up of a cluster of related objectives. Most objectives appear in more than one unit. Here is the Year 3 example showing an approximate number of weeks which could be spent on each unit:
Narrative block	Unit 1 Stories with familiar settings (3 weeks)	Unit 2 Dialogue and plays (4 weeks)	Unit 3 Myths, legends, fables, traditional tales (4 weeks)	Unit 4 Adventure and mystery (4 weeks)	Unit 5 Authors and letters (3 weeks)
Non-fiction block	Unit 1 Reports (4 weeks)	Unit 2 Instructions (3-4 weeks)	Unit 3 Information texts (4 weeks)
Poetry block	Unit 1 (4 weeks, which could be spread out)
Within each block the units need to be taught in numerical order because the units have been constructed to ensure progression across the year. Literacy should be at the heart of curriculum planning so that the subject matter from other curriculum areas is available as content or stimulus for speaking, listening, reading and writing. Equally, skills acquired in the literacy lesson should be applied during the rest of the school day. For that reason, the literacy units can be distributed in different ways across the year, so that schools can make effective links between the literacy units and the rest of the curriculum. However, because schools can choose how to distribute the units across a year, they will need to decide a linear teaching and learning progression through all the units for the word skills of reading and writing (word recognition and spelling). The units of work in each block range between two to four weeks in duration. This allows for sufficient time for response in reading, covering speaking and listening objectives, oral composition, writing and constructing multimodal texts. Here is an illustration of just one way of organising the Year 3 units across a school year.

	Year 3
Theme	Narrative	Non-fiction	Poetry	Narrative	Narrative	Non-fiction	Poetry	Narrative	Non-fiction	Narrative
Length of unit	3 weeks	4 weeks	2 weeks	4 weeks	4 weeks	3-4 weeks	2 weeks	4 weeks	4 weeks	3 weeks
Name of unit	Unit 1 Stories with familiar settings	Unit 1 Reports	Unit	Unit 2 Dialogue and plays	Unit 3 Myths, legends, fables, traditional tales	Unit 2 Instructions	Unit	Unit 4 Adventure and mystery	Unit 3 Information texts	Unit 5 Authors and letters


Primary National Strategy	© Crown copyright 2006	DPRF