How Bees Make Honey: explanation text
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Why this why now
This unit uses and builds on pupils' knowledge of certain non-fiction writing conventions from the Year 3 unit 'The Portia Spider: non-chronological report'. Here, pupils write their first explanation text in this curriculum, using the paragraphing structure of an introduction, themed sections and conclusion. Pupils include a variety of formal fronted adverbials and a range of causal conjunctions in their writing. Year 3 level sentence structures are reviewed and applied. This unit prepares pupils for more explanation text writing in the Year 3 unit, 'Mummification: explanation writing'.
Prior knowledge requirements
- The purpose of an explanation text to explain the process of how or why something happens.
- Explanation texts are a type of factual, non-fiction writing.
- Explanation texts are organised into paragraphs in chronological order of when the steps of the process happen.
- Explanation texts can contain visual information, most commonly diagrams or photographs accompanied by a caption.
- Important features of explanation texts include apostrophes for possession, subject-specific and factual vocabulary, numerical facts, sequencing and fronted adverbials of cause.
- Nouns can be referred to in a range of ways to avoid repetition.
Threads
Why this why now
This unit uses and builds on pupils' knowledge of certain non-fiction writing conventions from the Year 3 unit 'The Portia Spider: non-chronological report'. Here, pupils write their first explanation text in this curriculum, using the paragraphing structure of an introduction, themed sections and conclusion. Pupils include a variety of formal fronted adverbials and a range of causal conjunctions in their writing. Year 3 level sentence structures are reviewed and applied. This unit prepares pupils for more explanation text writing in the Year 3 unit, 'Mummification: explanation writing'.
Prior knowledge requirements
- The purpose of an explanation text to explain the process of how or why something happens.
- Explanation texts are a type of factual, non-fiction writing.
- Explanation texts are organised into paragraphs in chronological order of when the steps of the process happen.
- Explanation texts can contain visual information, most commonly diagrams or photographs accompanied by a caption.
- Important features of explanation texts include apostrophes for possession, subject-specific and factual vocabulary, numerical facts, sequencing and fronted adverbials of cause.
- Nouns can be referred to in a range of ways to avoid repetition.
Reading, writing & oracy
How Bees Make Honey: explanation text
In this unit, pupils research how bees make honey in order to write a clearly-presented explanation text. Pupils focus on writing facts using subject-specific vocabulary within Year 3 level sentence structures. Pupils learn to join two ideas of cause and effect across more than one sentence.
8 lessons in unit
slide decks, worksheet PDFs, quizzes and lesson overviews. You can select individual lessons from the How Bees Make Honey: explanation text unit and download the resources you need, or download the entire unit now. See every unit listed in our primary english curriculum and discover more of our teaching resources for primary english programmes.