'Children of the Quicksands' English scheme of work
Efua Traoré decided to write ‘Children of the Quicksands’ for her daughters. After one of her daughters came home from school one day saying she had learnt that children in Africa suffer and don’t have food, it was the straw which broke the camel’s back for Efua. She was tired of not seeing Nigerian children, African children or any black children at all in books! She was angry about the boring, depressing and vague image of Africa which did not let the true beauty of many of its countries shine through. So she wrote ‘Children of the Quicksands’: a thrilling adventure story set in Nigeria filled with magic, myths, legends, goddesses, culture, music, courage, pride and friendship.
Teaching From Text absolutely loved writing this six week English scheme of work for Upper Key Stage 2 Children to accompany Efua Traoré’s book, ‘Children of the Quicksands’. Our latest scheme of work has followed the DfE’s June 2021 guidance by creating plans and resources which encourage the children to complete shorter writing tasks to allow pupils to focus on sentence structure. Throughout the 30 English lessons, the children will be completely immersed in the rich and challenging text! They will get to know the characters, setting and storyline through grammar activities such as expanded noun phrases; relative clauses; commas, dashes and brackets to indicate parenthesis; modal verbs and adverbs to indicate degrees of possibility and learning about active and passive verbs. Their lessons will be engaging and varied including drama, links to art and a debate.
Alongside shorter writing tasks, the children will apply their grammar skills in a letter from the main character to her mother and a persuasive argument based around an emotive decision in the book.
As with all our schemes of work, our resources are fully differentiated, illustrated with hand-drawn images of the incredible characters, all lesson plans are detailed (but easy to follow) and include bespoke teaching videos using themes and characters from the book to help you teach tricky grammar concepts.
We are so excited that this scheme of work is ready for you to download now!
Cover image by Helen Crawford-White