This resource offers a delightful 2-week Year 1 English MTP (Medium Term Plan) centered around the entertaining narrative “There’s a Bear on My Chair” by Ross Collins. This unit is designed to entertain students, culminating in an independent outcome where they write their own version of the story.

What’s Included?
The plan details a variety of engaging activities for reading and writing, with a strong focus on reading fluency, retrieval, and making inferences based on what characters say and do. Students will have the opportunity to immerse themselves in the story by using puppets and masks, going on a “story hunt” to find and sequence hidden parts of the narrative, and playing phonics games like CEW (Common Exception Word) bingo and TW (Tricky Word) Jenga.

In their writing journey, pupils will practice composing sentences orally before writing them down, developing language from character descriptions, and creating 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” to root words, as well as demarcating sentences correctly with capital letters, full stops, and question marks. 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, correctly applying suffixes, and confidently reading their own writing aloud to check that it makes sense. Furthermore, it provides a specific Tier 2 and Tier 3 vocabulary list—featuring words like “glare,” “unaware,” “flair,” “despair,” and “lure”—alongside a curated list of supplementary reading texts such as There’s a Mouse in my House and This zoo is not for you. This plan is a fantastic tool for teachers seeking to develop narrative writing and Phase 5 phonics skills through a highly engaging and humorous text.