The objective of this unit is to help young learners to convey meaning to a reader through their factual accounts and reports.

Learners are presented with activities to write about what they see, what they do and what they know. Activities are based on models and scaffolding, for example, reading a short text about someone, then writing about yourself; completing gaps in texts based on pictures of a trip to the zoo; reading or listening to instructions for an experiment; and ordering sentences to make a sensible report. The focus is on communicating meaning rather than skills in grammar, punctuation and spelling. This unit lends itself to developing those vital transferable skills for all subjects which require factual writing.

In the first activity they read a short self-description written by someone else. Then they are invited to write about themselves by completing gaps in sentences. The second activity in this unit, a report of a visit to the zoo, encourages the writer to build up a picture of a visit that is both coherent and sequential. The writing frames with dropdown boxes encourage students to think about selecting appropriate words to convey meaning. The students build up an account of the visit sentence by sentence, and then are invited to read the completed model article for comparison with their account.

The third activity is a short and simple science experiment, where the focus is on correct sequencing. Here the drag and match activities encourage learners to think about writing a report in the correct order.

This unit can be done as a whole-class activity or by students working on their own or in pairs.

Extension

• Encourage verbal as well as written accounts of events inside and outside the classroom. Give equal weight to both types of reporting.
• Provide exercises that require pupils to think about the language they use to describe events. Select the most-used words such as 'nice', 'bad' and 'good', and get pupils to work in pairs or groups to come up with alternative words that are more precise. For example, 'nice dinner' and 'nice day' could be replaced by 'tasty dinner' and 'sunny day'.
• Use sentences from a simple recipe or instruction cut up into strips. Make it a game. Put pupils into groups and see which group can put the instructions into the correct order in the shortest space of time. If it is incorrectly assembled, try to get the children to think about why it wouldn't work, focusing on understanding the importance of putting things in the right order.