What it is. Unity means nothing in the paragraph is there for another reason.
Why our test works. Unity is hard to teach positively because every sentence a child writes seems relevant to them. Testing by DELETION is concrete: read the paragraph without the sentence and see whether the point is weaker. Most interesting-but-irrelevant sentences survive their own deletion untouched, and the child can hear that for themselves, which no amount of being told achieves.
Leans on. Grade 5's topic sentence named the idea. Unity is keeping to it.
Watch for. The best-written sentence in a paragraph is often the one that does not belong. Cutting it is the lesson.
Read and use Unity from Essay Voyage, pp.45–50. The worked example is the one you build on the board: Teacher reads the key passage of Unity aloud with the book open and models the move it tea The class reads Writing Book 6, p.53 — our own page, so a child who was absent can still get the lesson.
You open by saying where this sits — what it follows and what it is part of — in one sentence, and then you give them the reason it matters, in your own words, for about ten seconds. Before anything new, sixty seconds of retrieval on U1 set 1, U6 set 1, U8 set 1: ask, take the answers from boards rather than hands so you see all thirty, and do not re-teach — note who has lost it and carry on.
Then you do one yourself, building it on the board and leaving it up: Teacher reads the key passage of Unity aloud with the book open and models the move it teaches on one sentence. The board copy is what they look back at when they stall, so it stays there for the whole lesson.
The We-do is the main whiteboard moment of the lesson — short answers, boards up on your signal, every child visible at once. Class applies the move from Unity to two sentences together, checking against the book's own example. If the answer is a whole sentence rather than a word, take it on their notebooks instead, because a sentence written on a whiteboard is written once and destroyed.
They open Writing Book 6 to page 53 and read it with you. Stop at the worked example and let them look at it.
Exit directions in full, standing still, before anyone moves. Then they work alone: In your notebook: apply Unity to three sentences of your own, double-spaced.
You close on the exit direction — Read out one sentence that uses Unity. — taken from every child before anyone stands, and then the line you want them to still have tomorrow: One paragraph, one idea — and everything in it serving that idea.
The best-written sentence in a paragraph is often the one that does not belong. Cutting it is the lesson.