Reading Comprehension

The purpose of reading comprehension is to understand the words that have been read. 

Being able to understand what we read is a very important skill. In order to be good readers, we need to use strategies to help us build an understanding of a text and develop reading comprehension skills. 

Early Years

To develop understanding of a text, children engage in regular story telling sessions using high quality texts and discuss them. Texts are shared and discussed across the curriculum and they engage in shared reading activities. Our curriculum is language rich and is immersive, which supports children in developing comprehension skills also. 

Key Stage 1 and Key stage 2

At Stephenson we have an overview and progression in reading document. This outlines two comprehension skills, with strategies to support, each half term to focus on. This ensures all comprehension skills are taught explicitly, revisited, consolidated and extended across a range of genres in a 3 week cycle. It outlines the progression in reading comprehension skills across the key stages, showing the progression and knowledge development across the school. 

During the cycle, children will engage in a range of purposeful and planned reading activities in order to see the skills and strategy being modelled, use it to construct meaning in groups and pairs, and to independently apply this in their own reading. 

The regular purposeful and planned reading activities include:  

• Shared reading (in Literacy and across all areas of the curriculum);

• Guided reading;

• Paired reading; 

• Class reading time. 

Click on the strategies below to find out more information about how good readers use them to support developing an understanding of a text. These are then used to support developing reading comprehension skills in: 

• Retrieval; 

• Connections and Comparing;

• Predicting;

• Inference;

• Sequencing and Summarising;

• Vocabulary and Impact on the Reader/Evaluation.