Since the start of lockdown, there has been a lot of discussion around how schools will support pupils to ‘catch-up’ on lost learning time. Whether you are planning a ‘catch-up’ or ‘recovery’ curriculum, the key to moving forward will be enabling teachers to maximise learning opportunities for their children.

Using comprehension resources alongside reading books will make every reading opportunity the opportunity to develop comprehension skills.

In this blog, we explore two of our favourite reading comprehension resources and how they can help teachers to support their pupils.

Reading Comprehension Cards

The Reading Comprehension Cards come in year group cases and with over 50 texts in each, there is a wide range of choice and opportunity. Children will be supported to develop and deepen their reading comprehension, inference and analytical skills across all genres.

Why so good for catch-up?

• Each card has a text to read on one side of the card and questions on the other.
• All planning has been done for you so no need to spend hours searching online for suitable texts.
• The cards can be used with the whole class, in guided reading sessions or with smaller intervention groups.
• The questions on the cards require children to use a range of strategies.
• You can use cards from across different year group sets to support differentiation.
• The texts are all short in length enabling more children to access the text and meaning more time can be spent reading in detail.
• With over 50 texts for each year group, you could use one text a week for additional comprehension work.

Colour Band Comprehension Bookmarks

This is the perfect resource to ensure that every time a child reads is an opportunity to develop comprehension skills. The bookmarks offer suggested questions to ask a child when talking about their reading. The questions are arranged by colour book band so are appropriate to a child’s reading level.

Why so good for catch up?

• When time is made to share books together, these questions, combined with plenty of praise, careful listening and modelling of good reading will help develop pupils’ reading skills more successfully.
• The suggested questions help adults at home to feel empowered with how best to support their child therefore making home reading more purposeful.
• The bookmarks can be kept in a child’s reading book and sent between school and home so that all adults have a clear set of meaningful questions to ask.
• Every question is clearly marked with the reading strategy that is being developed, such as retrieve, explain and interpret.
• The bookmarks are prepared and ready to use!

Mastering the technical skills for reading is only part of the journey. It is also important to develop a love of reading by sharing books for fun! So, take some time and plan to enjoy reading books with your class.