Giving time over to drama lessons may feel like a risk, but it’s certain to deepen children’s understanding of fictional narratives, says former primary headteacher Ruth Baker-Leask… If teaching children phonics is all about giving them the tools for reading, it seems to me that lessons need to focus on comprehension as well as decoding. Understanding as well as decoding Use our collection of KS1 60 Second Reads to help your class dramatically improve their English fluency. Learning the nuances of a language is almost always tough. And for the most part, you need daily exposure and practice. Each of our KS1 60 Second Reads is a great tool if you're looking for fun resources that will really help your students develop their English ability. Each of the reading comprehension texts also comes with a set of greater depth reading questions that help KS1 students develop their vocabulary, reading skills and inference skills.

I wrote my own version, making sure I used only decodable words with graphemes the children already knew. ‘On a dark, dark night in a dark, dark wood was a dark, dark oak. In the dark, dark oak was a …’. This set of six worksheets from Jelly & Bean lets children practise skills like letter formation (both with and without guides), handwriting, comprehension and there are pictures to colour in on each. Not every teacher’s encounters with drama are positive. We have all experienced that stomach-lurching moment when, during a training session, an overzealous course leader asks you to try ‘a bit of role play’.Drama can feel daunting, and it would be easy to leave it in the hands of the talented, uninhibited few. However, many children have an often undiscovered natural talent for drama, and most pupils enjoy and engage with role play activities. ask questions about a text to help their understanding and engagement such as ‘Where is this set?’ or ‘Why did she do that?’ This short BBC Bitesize video helps children to understand that when you read a text, link together the facts and clues to see the bigger picture and understand what’s happening, that this is called comprehension.

Alongside the Dudgeon, other characters have unconventional names that require decoding skills, eg The Bombazine Bear and the Purple Kazoo.

Which poems can I read with children aged 5 to 7?

Improve pupils’ ability to make high-level inferences and links between texts, and extend their vocabulary with focused lessons. Boost inference and comprehension with Mini Grey’s mouse detective in this free KS1 book topic from Judy Clark, based on the book Hermelin: The Great Mouse Detective. Role play involves inhabiting the characters and their fictional world. Therefore, it’s best to give children time to explore these characters through book talk and discussion before leaping headfirst into a drama activity.

Access 54 original fiction, non-fiction and poetry texts by published children’s authors – all age appropriate, thematically linked, and fully annotated for ease of teaching. You might also like these The Zoo Vet Year 1 Comprehension Worksheets. How can students improve reading comprehension? Comprehension questions, based on short extracts from the book, will develop pupils’ understanding of what they have read, focusing on: retrieval, vocabulary, inference, sequencing and making predictions. Role play becomes more structured for older children but still provides the same benefits. It strengthens their comprehension skills by supporting them to make connections between a fictional world and their own lives. Fig 1 shows how the character feels (inside her outline) when she finds herself stranded on a strange planet. Around the outside of her outline are words that illustrate how others perceive Beegu (both her character and her appearance).

I began by making the sentences more interactive. I gave children a collection of pictures and a selection of sentences, each of which matched one of the images. All of these reading comprehension activities are linked to events that happen in May, such as The Coronation of King Charles III, VE Day, Florence Nightingale's Birthday and World Bee Day. These Year 1 English reading comprehension activities are perfect for introducing further conversations about the book, finding out your child's point of view and enjoying your favourite stories together. Like these Year 1 comprehension activities? There's more here... Our fantastic printable literacy worksheets and reading activities contain a variety of different question types for kids to answer. These questions will keep pupils engaged and test their ability to recall what they’ve read.

Some texts with a high score may need to be used with support or by children working at a high level within the stage. Some children often say that they don’t enjoy reading, or enjoy completing reading comprehension activities, but we’ve thought of that! We’ve designed our reading comprehensions specifically for reluctant readers and have included some slightly off the wall topics including an axolotl reading comprehension and a unicorn reading comprehension that are specifically designed to appeal to children. Some of our reading comprehension activities have actually been co-authored by our own children – who know a lot more about computer games than we do! Reading comprehensions linked to topics As you can see, drama and role play can support teachers to deepen children’s understanding of text in varied and engaging ways. This means you can avoid the temptation to only teach reading comprehension through the model of teacher questioning. Pupils will need to scan the book’s illustrations for clues, making it an ideal title for comprehension work. Children will need to explain what they can observe, what they know and what they can infer from that. At the end of Year 2, KS1 children will have to take the KS1 SATs assessments. Ourreading comprehension KS1 primary resources are the perfect way for you and your students to prepare for these tests.

How do these reading comprehension KS1 primary resources support learning?

If you're looking for a few recommendations on which resource to start with, take a look at the next section. Recommended KS1 60 Second Reads: Each stage relates to year-group expectations. Stage 1 = Year 1, Stage 2 = Year 2 etc. We have called them stages in case you have children working at a level that differs from their own year group. This way a Y4 child working below expectations does not have to complete work with a Y2 label, for example. The following table shows the ATOS score and the percentage of children who should be able to read the text in each year group. For example, if a text in Y3 has a score of 3.62 - 4.2, it should be independently accessible to children between the 50 and 25 percentile. If a text has a score of 4.5 in a year 4 text, it should be independently accessed by the top 10% of children in the class.