This resource offers an enchanting 4-week Year 1 English MTP (Medium Term Plan) dedicated to the beloved stories of Julia Donaldson, with a special focus on Stick Man and Room on the Broom. Designed to entertain, this comprehensive narrative unit guides students toward multiple exciting independent outcomes: writing a diary entry for Stick Man, creating their own version of the story, and writing a letter to Julia Donaldson.

What’s Included?
The plan details a variety of engaging activities for reading and writing, with a strong focus on making predictions, asking questions, and retrieving information to clearly explain their understanding of the texts. Students will have the opportunity to immerse themselves in Julia Donaldson’s world by exploring a range of her books, using puppets and masks for role-play, and going on a “story hunt” to find and sequence hidden parts of the narrative. To build inference skills, pupils will read and write thought bubbles, match feeling words to Stick Man at different parts of the story, and match characters with the objects they found in Room on the Broom.

In their writing journey, pupils will practice composing sentences orally before writing them down, engage with adjective games to describe characters, and create story maps. The plan heavily supports foundational grammar and phonics, featuring activities designed to teach the addition of suffixes like “-er,” “-est,” “-ing,” and “-ed,” the prefix “un-,” and the correct use of capital letters for proper nouns. Students will also practice extending their ideas by matching chopped-up sentences, focusing on using conjunctions like “and,” “but,” or “because” to link ideas.

The resource includes a detailed Marking Ladder to assess skills such as using five graphemes to sound out words, accurately demarcating sentences with capital letters and full stops, and confidently reading their own writing aloud to check that it makes sense. Furthermore, it provides specific vocabulary lists for both Stick Man (featuring words like “frolicking,” “deserted,” and “boomerang”) and Room on the Broom (including “wailed,” “shriek,” and “clambered”). To extend reading for pleasure, the plan also includes a curated list of supplementary texts such as The Gruffalo, Zog, The Highway Rat, and Monkey Puzzle. This plan is a fantastic tool for teachers seeking to develop narrative writing, phonics application, and reading comprehension through the magical worlds of a treasured author.