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English lesson plan · 4th grade (Year 5 in England) · 45 minutes

Text structure (cause–effect, compare, problem–solution)

Reading Comprehension

CCSS RI.4.5CCSS RI.5.5England: Y5/6 ReadingEngland: KS2 SATs Reading

Objective and success criteria

Students will: Text structure (cause–effect, compare, problem–solution).

  • I can answer questions on today's skill on my own, without help.
  • I can explain each step and say why it works.
  • I can check my answer and spot a mistake.

Before and after

Needs first: Order of events; Main idea and supporting details

Leads to: Analysing structure; Plot stages: exposition to resolution; Foreshadowing, flashback, cliffhanger and red herring

Materials: A short text or extract (one copy each), Highlighters, Question cards, Mini whiteboards, A short model text on the board, Printed student sheet (below).

Warm-up · 5 min

  • Quick retrieval from earlier learning (Order of events; Main idea and supporting details). Students answer on mini whiteboards.
  • Show answers together and note who needs support in the main task.
  1. The caterpillar ate and ate. Then it made a cocoon. At last, a butterfly came out. What happened last? (The caterpillar ate. / A butterfly came out. / It laid an egg. / It made a cocoon.) → A butterfly came out.Prompt: Look for time words: first, then, next, after, finally.
  2. First, Pia put on her socks. Next, she put on her shoes. Then she ran outside. What did Pia do last? (ran outside / went to bed / put on her socks / put on her shoes) → ran outsidePrompt: Look for time words: first, then, next, after, finally.
  3. The alarm rang. Amy got up and brushed her teeth. After that, she ate breakfast. What did Amy do right after she got up? (brushed her teeth / went to bed / set the alarm / ate breakfast) → brushed her teethPrompt: Look for time words: first, then, next, after, finally.

Hook · 5 min

  • Read the first lines of a short text aloud and ask what students predict will happen and why.
  • Share the objective: Text structure (cause–effect, compare, problem–solution). Read the success criteria together.

I do: model it · 10 min

  • Work through the example out loud, saying why you do each step, not just what you do.
  • Example: The desert is hot and dry. Sand dunes stretch for miles, cacti stand tall, and lizards dart between the rocks. How is this text organised?
  • Step 1: Text structure is how a writer organises ideas.
  • Step 2: So the answer is: description
  • Answer: description
  • Pause after each step and ask a student to say what comes next.

We do: guided practice · 10 min

  • Do these together. Students try each step on whiteboards before you reveal it.
  • Use the hints as prompts rather than giving the answer.
  1. The desert is hot and dry. Sand dunes stretch for miles, cacti stand tall, and lizards dart between the rocks. How is this text organised? (sequence / compare and contrast / problem and solution / description) → descriptionPrompt: How is the information organised?
  2. The playground was always full of litter. The pupils decided to put more bins around and take turns being litter monitors. Now it is clean. How is this text organised? (description / problem and solution / cause and effect / compare and contrast) → problem and solutionPrompt: How is the information organised?

You do: independent practice · 10 min

  • Students work on the student sheet. Circulate and check the first two answers of every student early.
  • Students who finish: write a question of their own for a partner, with the answer.

The 8 questions are on the student sheet below, with answers in the key.

Exit ticket · 5 min

  • Two questions on their own. Sort answers into got it / nearly / not yet to plan the next lesson.
  1. Because the river flooded, many roads were closed. As a result, the school buses could not run, so school was cancelled. How is this text organised? (problem and solution / compare and contrast / cause and effect / description) → cause and effectPrompt: How is the information organised?

Watch out for

  • Answering from memory or opinion instead of evidence in the text.
  • Copying a long quote without explaining what it shows.

Support and stretch

Support

  • Review first: Order of events.
  • Use concrete materials: a short text or extract (one copy each).
  • Give the first step of each question, or a partly worked example to finish.
  • Pair with a confident partner for the guided practice.

Stretch

  • Move on to: Analysing structure; Plot stages: exposition to resolution; Foreshadowing, flashback, cliffhanger and red herring.
  • Explain a common mistake in writing and how to fix it.
  • Write a word problem that uses today's skill, then solve a partner's.

Homework and more practice

Free online practice with hints and printable worksheets for this skill: eurekami.com/english/grade-4.

Free lesson plan from eurekami.com/lesson-plan-builder

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Text structure (cause–effect, compare, problem–solution)

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How to Build a Junk Robot

Do you have a pile of empty boxes and bottle tops? Instead of throwing them away, turn them into a robot! This project takes about an hour. You will need: one cereal box, one smaller box (such as a toothpaste box), four cardboard tubes, bottle tops, glue, scissors and some tape. Step 1: Ask an adult to help you cut a hole in the top of the cereal box. This will be the robot's body. Step 2: Glue the smaller box on top of the body to make the head. Hold it in place for a minute while the glue sets. Step 3: Tape two cardboard tubes to the sides of the body for arms and two to the bottom for legs. Step 4: Glue bottle tops onto the head for eyes and onto the body for buttons and dials. Step 5: Leave your robot to dry overnight before you play with it. Top tip: Give your robot a name and write it on a label. Robots with names are much more fun!

  1. Question 1

    Read "How to Build a Junk Robot". What should you do just after gluing on the head?

    • A. Leave it to dry overnight.
    • B. Cut a hole in the box.
    • C. Give it a name.
    • D. Hold it in place for a minute.

The Long Wall

The Great Wall of China is not one wall at all. It is a network of walls, trenches and watchtowers built and rebuilt over more than two thousand years by different dynasties. If all its sections were laid end to end, they would stretch over 21,000 kilometres – more than half the distance around the Earth. The earliest walls were built from packed earth around the seventh century BCE, when rival Chinese states defended their borders from one another. In about 220 BCE, the first emperor of a united China, Qin Shi Huang, ordered many of these separate walls to be joined together to protect the north from raiding groups. The sections that most visitors see today are far younger. They were built during the Ming dynasty, between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries. Ming builders used bricks and stone, which is why these sections have survived so well. Watchtowers were placed close enough together for soldiers to send signals using smoke by day and fire by night. The wall came at a terrible cost. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers, prisoners and farmers were forced to work on it, often in freezing mountains or burning deserts. Many died, and stories and songs about their suffering are still told. Did the wall work? Historians disagree. It slowed down small raids and helped control trade and travel, but determined armies could still break through or simply go around it. Today, its greatest power may be as a symbol – of human effort, of history and of a nation's identity.

  1. Question 2

    Read "The Long Wall". How are paragraphs 2 and 3 mainly organised?

    • A. as a problem and solution
    • B. as a comparison of two countries
    • C. in chronological order
    • D. as a list of opinions

Speech: Our Beach, Our Responsibility

Good morning, everyone. Last Saturday, twenty-three pupils from this school spent three hours on Sandy Bay beach. We collected forty-one bags of rubbish. Forty-one. Bottles, crisp packets, fishing line, a shoe, and – I promise you this is true – an entire garden chair. Now, I know what some of you are thinking. "It's not my rubbish. Why should I pick it up?" And you're right: most of us didn't drop it. But here's the thing. The seal pup that gets tangled in that fishing line doesn't care whose fault it was. The toddler who cuts her foot on broken glass doesn't care either. That beach belongs to all of us. We swim there in summer. We walk our dogs there in winter. Some of us learned to ride our bikes on the promenade. If it belongs to all of us, then looking after it belongs to all of us too. So I'm asking you for just one thing. Not money. Not your whole weekend. Just two hours, on the first Saturday of next month. Bring gloves, bring a friend, bring your little brother if you have to. Because if twenty-three of us can fill forty-one bags, imagine what four hundred of us could do. Thank you.

  1. Question 3

    Read "Speech: Our Beach, Our Responsibility". How does the speaker make the ending powerful?

    • A. She lists rules for the clean-up.
    • B. She introduces a new problem.
    • C. She tells a sad story.
    • D. She uses the earlier numbers to imagine a much bigger result.

The Margin

Zainab had read the library book three times before she noticed the handwriting. It was in the margin of page 112, so faint she had taken it for a smudge. In tiny, slanted letters, someone had written: "Don't trust the narrator." Underneath, in different ink and a rounder hand, someone else had replied: "Why not?" And beneath that, in the first writer's slant: "Read chapter 9 again." She read chapter 9 again. Then she read it a fourth time, and a fifth, and on the sixth she saw it – a single sentence where the narrator claimed to have been at home when, three chapters earlier, he had described himself on a train. A lie, hidden in plain sight. The whole story tilted, like a picture knocked crooked on a wall. Zainab sat back. She checked the date stamps on the card inside the front cover. The book had been borrowed forty-seven times since 1994. Somewhere among those forty-seven readers were two people who had held a conversation across years without ever meeting. She found a pencil. For a long time she hesitated over the page, feeling as if she were about to speak in a room full of strangers. Then, carefully, beneath the other two, she wrote: "Found it. Thank you." When she returned the book, the librarian frowned at the pencil marks. Zainab apologised. But as she walked home, she wondered who would be next to find them.

  1. Question 4

    Read "The Margin". What is the effect of the final sentence?

    • A. It ends the story with a twist about the librarian.
    • B. It suggests the chain of readers will continue.
    • C. It shows Zainab regrets writing.
    • D. It reveals who the first writer was.

The Clever Octopus

If you wanted to design an intelligent animal from scratch, you probably would not start with a creature that has no bones, three hearts and blue blood. Yet the octopus is one of the most remarkable problem-solvers in the animal kingdom. In laboratories, octopuses have learned to unscrew jar lids to reach crabs inside. Some have escaped from their tanks at night, crept across the floor to a neighbouring tank to eat the fish, and then returned home before morning. In the wild, veined octopuses have been filmed collecting coconut shells, carrying them across the seabed and assembling them into a portable shelter – one of the few known examples of tool use by an invertebrate. What makes this intelligence so surprising is how different the octopus brain is from ours. About two-thirds of its roughly 500 million nerve cells are not in its head at all but in its eight arms. Each arm can taste, touch and even make simple decisions on its own. Scientists are still debating what it might feel like to be an animal whose thinking is spread throughout its body. The octopus's cleverness may be linked to its lifestyle. Without a shell for protection, it must outwit predators by hiding, changing colour in a fraction of a second, or squeezing through gaps no bigger than its beak. Survival depends on flexible thinking. Strangely, most octopuses live only one or two years. They have no parents to teach them and usually die soon after laying eggs. Every skill they show, they must largely work out for themselves.

  1. Question 5

    Read "The Clever Octopus". What is the relationship between paragraph 4 and the rest of the text?

    • A. It suggests a cause for the octopus's intelligence.
    • B. It introduces a counterargument.
    • C. It tells a story about a single octopus.
    • D. It describes how to keep an octopus.

A Helicopter on Mars

In February 2021, NASA's Perseverance rover landed on Mars. Tucked underneath it was a passenger: a tiny helicopter called Ingenuity. It weighed only about 1.8 kilograms, a little less than a big bag of flour. Flying on Mars is much harder than flying on Earth. The air on Mars is extremely thin, about one hundredth as thick as the air we breathe. Helicopter blades push against the air to lift off, so with so little air, Ingenuity's blades had to spin very fast: about 2,400 times a minute. On 19 April 2021, Ingenuity rose about three metres into the Martian sky, hovered for about forty seconds and landed again. It was the first powered, controlled flight on another planet. Engineers on Earth cheered, even though the radio signals took several minutes to reach them. Ingenuity was only meant to make five test flights. Instead, it made 72. It scouted ahead for the rover, taking photos of rocks and slopes so that drivers on Earth could choose safe routes. In January 2024, one of Ingenuity's blades was damaged during a landing, and the mission ended. The little helicopter still sits on Mars today, and engineers are already using what they learned to design bigger flying machines for future missions.

  1. Question 6

    Read "A Helicopter on Mars". How is this text mainly organised?

    • A. in time order, from landing to the end of the mission
    • B. as a list of opinions
    • C. as a comparison of two planets
    • D. as a problem with no solution

Harbour at Dawn (GCSE-style extract)

The harbour did not so much wake as surrender to the morning. Fog lay over the water like a damp grey blanket that someone had forgotten to fold, and the fishing boats nodded at their moorings, half-asleep, their ropes creaking in complaint. Old Tomas was already there. He was always there. He sat on an upturned crate at the end of the quay, mending a net with fingers that had long ago stopped feeling the cold. His knife flashed, paused, flashed again. Every so often he lifted his head and sniffed the air, as if the sea had written him a letter only he could read. Behind him, the town stirred reluctantly. A shutter rattled up. A dog barked twice and thought better of it. Somewhere a kettle began its thin, rising whistle. The smell of bread drifted from the bakery on Water Lane and mixed with the older, deeper smells of salt, diesel and fish. Then the sun arrived. It did not rise so much as break through – one bright blade splitting the fog, then another, until the whole harbour was suddenly ablaze. The water turned from slate to copper. Gulls exploded upward from the harbour wall, screaming. The boats seemed to sit up straighter. Tomas did not look up. He tied off the last knot, tested it with a sharp tug, and laid the net across his knees like a sleeping cat. Only then did he raise his eyes to the brightening sea, and for a moment, just a moment, his face softened into something very close to a smile.

  1. Question 7

    Read "Harbour at Dawn (GCSE-style extract)". Why might the writer end with Tomas's near-smile?

    • A. to reveal a twist about his identity
    • B. to show he is angry about the weather
    • C. to introduce a new character
    • D. to end on a quiet, personal moment after the dramatic sunrise

The Fennec Fox

The fennec fox is the smallest fox in the world. It weighs about as much as a bag of sugar. It lives in the Sahara Desert in North Africa, one of the hottest places on Earth. The first thing most people notice about the fennec fox is its enormous ears. They can be as long as 15 centimetres, which is huge for such a small animal. The ears do two important jobs. First, they let heat escape from the fox's body, helping it to stay cool. Second, they are so sensitive that the fox can hear insects moving under the sand. The fennec fox has other ways to survive in the desert, too. Thick fur on the bottoms of its feet protects it from the burning sand. During the hottest part of the day, it rests in a cool burrow underground. It comes out to hunt at night, when the air is cooler. Water is hard to find in the desert, but the fennec fox can go a long time without drinking. It gets most of the water it needs from the food it eats, such as insects, plants and small animals.

  1. Question 8

    Read "The Fennec Fox". How is paragraph 2 mainly organised?

    • A. It tells a story in time order.
    • B. It compares two kinds of fox.
    • C. It describes a feature and then explains its uses.
    • D. It gives instructions.

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Answer key: Text structure (cause–effect, compare, problem–solution)

  1. 1. D. Hold it in place for a minute.

  2. 2. C. in chronological order

  3. 3. D. She uses the earlier numbers to imagine a much bigger result.

  4. 4. B. It suggests the chain of readers will continue.

  5. 5. A. It suggests a cause for the octopus's intelligence.

  6. 6. A. in time order, from landing to the end of the mission

  7. 7. D. to end on a quiet, personal moment after the dramatic sunrise

  8. 8. C. It describes a feature and then explains its uses.