Reading Skills Summary

The Reading Skills Summary for Years 5 and 6 outlines a series of objectives that align with the National Curriculum (NC) to enhance students' comprehension and analytical skills. The first skill focuses on the ability to identify and discuss themes and conventions within a text. This foundational skill encourages students to recognise recurring ideas and the framework of different genres. The second skill involves engaging with the text at a deeper level, as students discuss words and phrases that spark their interest and imagination, enhancing their appreciation for language and its creative use.

Further skills include the ability to understand the text and clarify meanings, as outlined in Reading Skill 3, where students check for coherence and explore vocabulary within context. Reading Skill 4 advances to drawing inferences about characters' feelings, thoughts, and motives, requiring students to justify their assumptions with evidence from the text. Predictive skills are developed in Reading Skill 5, where students anticipate future events based on both explicit and implicit details. Summarisation is the focus of Reading Skill 6, as students distil the main ideas from multiple paragraphs. Reading Skill 7 delves into the analysis of how language, structure, and presentation affect meaning, while Reading Skill 8 is about extracting and recording factual information from non-fiction sources. Advanced skills, marked with an asterisk and specific to Years 5 and 6, include comparing content within and across books, evaluating authors' use of language and its impact on readers, and distinguishing between factual statements and opinions, as detailed in Reading Skills 9 to 11.