Year 5 texts

[CFHL]

Hi All,
In September I moved from year 4 to year 5 and was told the year 5 writing needs a shake up. So far, all of the texts we have taught have been rubbish. Can anyone recommend any good texts that will support teaching various genres in English? We use the talk writes sequences but haven’t had much luck with any of them being overly inspiring!
TYIA

I don't know talk writes, but The Explorer, The Night Bus Hero, All the Things that Could Go Wrong and Holes are my favourite books for Upper KS2. Explorer for the language, Night Bus and All the Things for being thought provoking and down to earth, and Holes for being incredibly engaging with a beautifully constructed plot.

Thank you for your help. How do you teach with these longer texts?

I was using focus English when I taught Y5/6, which I thought was great. Lots of text focused tasks initially, which matches better with how English is taught in secondary. So read a chapter or a shorter extract, analyse the language, inference, sequencing etc. But alongside that, sentence and paragraph level writing work within each lesson eg. Analyse the descriptive language in the text, then write your own descriptive paragraph. Or sequence the key events of the first seven chapters, then write a paragraph to predict what happens to character X next, focusing on adverbials of place and time.

Then working towards a big write to synthesise all of those skills. Those two tasks might lead to a diary of the character's journey so far.

We didn't often read the whole text in English. They were carried over into reading for pleasure time once the writing outcomes had been achieved. Or some were used simultaneously in guided reading. My favourite time saver was using audio books to play a chapter that was less critical, so that we reached the point we needed for English.

If you want short texts as models for a specific genre which includes grammar features you want to cover, AI is brilliant. Just be really specific about the age group, subject contect etc and of course proof read. Saves loads of time hunting for stuff.