The Highwayman

Project Overview

During our writing lessons we follow ‘The Write Stuff’ scheme of work. 

This half term we used the narrative poem ‘The Highwayman’ to inspire our writing. First of all we  looked at the poem and identified its shapes. We found that the poem had 3 main shapes: stanzas, key events and repeated refrain. We then completed an experience day, where we found out what a highwayman was. After that, completed 10 sentence stacking lessons using our teachers ideas and our own ideas to create our own poems based on ‘The Highwayman’. Finally, we used everything we were taught to write our own narrative poems. We really enjoyed this unit of writing!

What The Student Says

“I really enjoyed this topic in writing. I loved how gory it was but it did have a really sad ending. I really liked how we learnt to use lots of personification. “- Pupil from 5NW. 

“I think doing The Highwayman in writing has been my favourite topic so far. I have found it really interesting and I have enjoyed creating my own modern day version of the poem.”- Pupil from 5AO.

What skills were developed?

We developed a wide range of skills during this writing unit. These included:

  • using strategies to build our vocabulary. 
  • participating in discussions and performances.
  •  gaining and maintaining the interest of readers. 
  • using  similar writing as models for our own work. 
  • proposing changes to vocabulary, grammar and punctuation to enhance effects and clarify meaning.
  • using hyphens to avoid ambiguity.
  • using expanded noun phrases to convey complicated information concisely.

What The Teacher Says

” The children thoroughly enjoyed this unit of writing. There is a rather gory storyline within the narrative poem but the children responded well to this and it really seemed to engage them. The children have definitely broadened their vocabulary during this unit. 

The quality of the children’s work during this piece of writing has been absolutely amazing! They have created some excellent content that really engages the reader. They have also worked hard to widen their understanding of a range of punctuation. ” 

Miss Wood, 5NW