2025 Years 3-6 Novel Studies Update

At Ochre Education, we are deeply committed to continually refining our resources in response to ongoing user feedback and cycles of review. We’re delighted to announce that we have some upcoming changes to the 3-6 English Curriculum resources for 2025. A summary of these changes are outlined below to support schools with planning for 2025.

2025 Yearly Overview

• Reduction in total weeks timetabled: for each year group, we have programmed a total of 34 weeks across the year, with lessons being taught every day
  • This 34 week programming allows flexibility for schools with:
    • An Optional Timing Poetry Unit in each year group, which can be moved flexibly later in the year to meet school need
    • Consolidation weeks (in Terms 1 and 4)
    • An Optional Unit (in Term 4). This is designed to focus on opportunities for practice, so can be included or omitted as required.
• Composite Schedule: a new composite schedule has also been added to provide support and guidance to schools using the resources in multi age classrooms. This composite schedule for Year 3/4 and 5/6 provides a suggested 2-year cycle, ensuring all genres are covered across each year.
• New Texts:
  • We have updated the Yearly Overview with new texts that we will be creating for each term in 2025.
  • A new text has been added in Year 6 / Term 1 (Week 1-5) ‘Ghost In My Suitcase’ as an alternative option to ‘Rivet Boy’ due to supply issues.
• Units Moved:
  • Year 4 ‘The Wild Robot’ will be moving from Term 4 to Term 3
  • Year 6 ‘Can You See Me’ will be moving from Term 4 to Term 3

The new 2025 Yearly Overview can be accessed by clicking on the button labelled ‘Yearly overview and lesson structure’ on the Curriculum Maps page, in the Years 3-6 Novel Studies section.

2025 Unit Plans

• Full Term Unit Plan: each year level will have one full term Unit Plan instead of single Unit Plans for each text. This allows teachers to have the full term’s content in one easy to manage location.
• Composite Unit Plans: individualised Unit Plans will be created for composite classrooms to support the delivery of the Composite Yearly Overview schedule. 
• Hyperlinks:
  • A hyperlink to the lesson resources for each day will be added, enabling easy access to all of the resources required to deliver a lesson.
  • A hyperlink to the Teacher Guides listed in the Unit Plans will be added (e.g. Paired Fluency, Vocabulary, Text Reading Guide), enabling easy access to the support materials available.
• Assessment Opportunities: assessment opportunities for sentence and text level writing lessons will be added to the bottom of each lesson. These suggestions will provide teachers with guidance on ways that formative assessment can be incorporated into each lesson. 
• Greyed Out Lessons: there are a number of suggested greyed out sentence-level writing lessons which could be omitted across each term, should teachers need more instructional time to complete the core unit content. This content that could be omitted has been selected as students have already had significant opportunity to be taught and to practise this target. These sentence-level skills are also reviewed in later units across the year.

2025 Novel Study Guides

• Composite Novel Study Guides: individualised Novel Study Guides will be created for composite classrooms to support the delivery of the Composite Yearly Overview schedule.
• Achievement Standards: Achievement Standards will be added into each novel study, and the elements the novel study contributes to will be bolded.

Literacy Skills Section

• Grammar: the Literacy Skills section of the curriculum where grammar has a weekly lesson has seen a revised grammar scope and sequence implemented for 2025. These revisions see a more refined scope and sequence with the introduction of some new targets in line with curriculum updates, as well as the inclusion of some additional targets from The Syntax Project.
• Scope and Sequence Documents: new scope and sequence documents will be added for grammar and handwriting, to complement the existing spelling scope and sequence which is already available on the website.

We hope these updates will make implementing and using the 3-6 English resources an even more positive experience for you in 2025.