A 3-week, fully resourced primary literacy unit based on Apollo 13: Engineering the Impossible by Ron Howard. 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 leading primary schemes (Literacy Tree, Write Stuff, Power of Reading).

• 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 two-part written response: a first-person historical narrative capturing a single critical moment of the Apollo 13 mission from one perspective (astronaut, flight director, or engineer), followed by an informational text explaining the engineering ingenuity — particularly the CO2 scrubber solution — that brought the crew safely home.

Grammar features (Year 6 NC-aligned)

• Relative clauses introduced by ‘who’, ‘which’, ‘whose’, ‘where’ and the relative pronoun omitted, used to add technical and characterising detail without breaking narrative pace.
• Modal auxiliary verbs (must, could, might, should, would) used to convey degrees of possibility, obligation and calculated certainty in the language of crisis response.

Themes explored

Crisis and ingenuity — solving the unsolvable with only what is in the spacecraft, Failure is not an option — Mission Control’s discipline of refusing the easy narrative of loss, The partnership between ground and crew — trust, voice, and shared problem-solving across 200,000 miles.

Key vocabulary

Ingenuity, trajectory, contingency, improvise, ambient, abort, scrubber, splashdown.

Format & compatibility

• Editable PowerPoint (.pptx) and Word (.docx) files.
• UK English spelling.
• One printer-friendly A4 page per resource sheet.
• Compatible with Literacy Tree, Write Stuff, and Power of Reading planning approaches.

Year groups & key stage

• Year 6 (KS2).
• 15 sessions over 3 weeks (≈45–60 minutes per lesson).

Tags

KS2, Year 6, English, fiction, Ron Howard, reading and writing, complete unit, differentiated, NC-aligned, lesson plans, resources, apollo 13: engineering the impossible