FREE Mini-scheme: The Owl Who was Afraid of the Dark: Diary Entries

This series of three lessons based on The Owl who was Afraid of the Dark explores the character of Plop and his experiences in learning about the dark through diary entries.

Your class will explore some of Plop’s diaries for themselves, looking at the language and grammatical features used, before improving a diary entry using what they have learnt and finally writing their own diary entries as Plop!

This series of three lessons, linked closely to the Year 3 English objectives, contains everything you need to teach these lessons to your KS2 class. There are detailed lesson plans, slideshows for the whole-class teaching input, differentiated activity ideas and a range of printable teaching resources.

Reading Plop's Diary

In the first lesson of this diaries planning pack, your class will read a diary entry written by Plop about his adventures with fireworks in the first chapter of the The Owl who was Afraid of the Dark. They will explore the features of diary entries as a class using the provided slideshow for the teaching input and look at the type of language Plop has used.

During their independent work, they choose sentences Plop might say in his diary, based on what they have learnt, or highlight given features.

This lesson contains an easy-to-follow lesson plan, a slideshow, differentiated activity ideas and a range of printable teaching resources.

View Lesson 1

Improving Diaries

Now that your class can identify the features of diary entries, they will start thinking about how they could write their own diary entry as Plop.

During the whole-class input, they will look at a badly written example on the slides and explore how they can improve it, one sentence at a time, using adjectives, adverbs, conjunctions, clauses and other features. There is also the chance to investigate how to improve sentences using the fun spiral sentence method!

This diary entries KS2 lesson contains a lesson plan, slideshow, differentiated activity ideas and a range of printable resources.

View Lesson 2

Writing Diary Entries

In the final lesson of this three-part series, your Year 3 class will recap what they have learnt about diaries. Your children will then follow the provided diary plans to write a diary entry as Plop for one of the remaining chapters of the story.

They will write some starting sentences as a class, then work independently to write a diary entry of their own. There is also the option to record these diary entries as vlogs!

This lesson contains a detailed lesson plan, a slideshow for the whole-class teaching input, differentiated activity ideas and a range of printable resources.

View Lesson 3