Year 1 Writing Unit: Look Up! – Poetry and Recount

Brand new for 2025 is this awesome writing unit for KS1, specifically Year 1.

This unit uses a poem from James Carter’s brilliant book Zim Zam Zoom, and Nathan Bryon’s excellent picture book Look Up! to support children with writing poetry and short diary entry recounts!

Intended to be used over a period of four weeks, there are a variety of vocabulary, oracy and writing tasks designed to build the children’s knowledge, understanding and application of the elements of the KS1 writing curriculum.

The unit covers a range of National Curriculum writing objectives including:

• Compose a sentence orally before writing it.
• Read aloud writing clearly enough to be heard by their peers and teacher.

• Use adjectives to describe.

• Leave spaces between words.
• Begin to punctuate sentences using capital letters and full stops.
• Recognise and use exclamation marks.
• Use a capital letter for the pronoun ‘I.’
• Sequence sentences to form short narratives.