Reading Skills Summary

The Reading Skills Summary for Years 5 and 6 encompasses a series of objectives aimed at enhancing students' comprehension and analytical abilities when engaging with texts. The first skill focuses on identifying and discussing themes and conventions within literature, allowing students to recognise overarching ideas and common literary devices. The second skill encourages pupils to explore and discuss words and phrases that particularly captivate their interest and stir their imagination, enhancing their appreciation for the author's craft.

Further skills include the ability to check for textual coherence and to discuss and clarify understanding, delving into the meanings of words within their context (Skill 3). Skill 4 involves drawing inferences about characters' feelings, thoughts, and motives based on their actions, and supporting these inferences with evidence from the text. Predicting potential outcomes based on explicit or implicit details is another key skill (Skill 5), as is the ability to identify and summarise main ideas from multiple paragraphs (Skill 6). Students also learn to discern how the use of language, structure, and presentation affects meaning (Skill 7), and how to efficiently extract and record information from non-fiction sources (Skill 8). Advanced skills exclusive to Years 5 and 6 include making comparisons within and across books (Skill 9), discussing and evaluating the use of language by authors, including figurative language, and its impact on readers (Skill 10), and distinguishing between factual statements and opinions (Skill 11).