Inspiration please! Any suggestions for Literacy intervention SOW?

[Perkyduck131]

Working on the Summer SOW for our literacy intervention groups and am really struggling... it’s small groups (between 4-8 students per class), two hours a week. They’ve already worked on comprehension skills in short, unseen texts for Spring 1 and 2 but ideally wanted a novel focus for Summer 1 and 2 to bring in some analysis, understanding of characterisation etc.

This is where I’m stumped. I love the idea of Wonder or Holes- but the books are just too long to complete in Summer term given we only see them for two hours a week. Are there any shorter texts that would would recommend? Or shall I scrap the idea of a novel and work exclusively on writing skills? In which case, any direction would be great.

Oh, groups are in Year 8 but average reading age of around 8 years. So I feel David Walliams/ Roald Dahl may be too ‘young’- happy to hear other opinions on this though.

Thanks so much for any help- pulling my hair out here!

Have you considered picture books aimed at older audiences? Some have quite advanced themes and can inspire great writing. The Promise / Shackleton’s Journey / A Bus Called Heaven / The Matchbox Diary / The Journey / The Arrival are all good and cover themes including immigration and war. If you wanted a longer book, A Monster Calls is great and again it is thematically suitable.

I’m the English lead of a primary school and we have used all of the above with our upper KS2 children over the last few years and they are great. You can cover writing skills about also reading comprehension too.

James Patterson wrote something novels for young adults with dyslexia (think his son is dyslexic). Friends tell me they are great as more teenage material but easy to read.

What about some Michael Morpurgo? I've used plenty different ones with KS2 and the themes seem like they'd be suitable for significantly older kids.

I've used Pale for a few literacy interventions, I absolutely love it, its short and sweet very manageable for a term intervention, lends itself well to a mini literature study, has strong themes and interesting characters, best of all I'm yet to have a child who doesn't enjoy it. Written by Chris Wooding

If you're looking for something even shorter book trust released lots of short books for world book day, our librarian got hold of multiple copies of a few, I'm working on a set of work around 'The Case of the Drowned Pearl' by Robin Stevens. Its 75 pages.

These are brilliant suggestions, thanks so much. Am going to download Pale, The Promise and The Matchbox Diary as a starting point. The Promise looks beautiful and has some language techniques in there which could give us some nice opportunities for analysis. I do love some of the Barrington Stoke in terms of accessibility but the ones I’ve tried to plan for don’t have enough ‘meat’ to make a challenging lesson out of.
Was also looking at Michael Morpurgo but even they seem too long for two hours a week unfortunately - would be great in terms of themes etc though!