Reading Skills Summary

The Reading Skills Summary for Years 5 and 6 outlines a series of objectives aligned with the National Curriculum (NC) to enhance students' reading abilities. The first skill focuses on the ability to identify and discuss themes and conventions within texts, fostering an understanding of the underlying messages and common literary techniques. Reading Skill 2 emphasises the importance of engaging with and appreciating language, encouraging students to discuss words and phrases that particularly capture their interest and fuel their imagination.

Reading Skill 3 involves checking for comprehension, ensuring the text makes sense, and exploring the meaning of words within their specific context. The fourth skill delves deeper into the text, requiring students to draw inferences about characters' feelings, thoughts, and motives based on their actions, and to support these inferences with evidence from the text. Predicting future events or outcomes based on stated or implied details is the focus of Reading Skill 5. For Reading Skill 6, students must be able to identify and summarise the main ideas from multiple paragraphs. The seventh skill highlights the importance of understanding how the use of language, structure, and presentation contributes to the overall meaning of a text. Reading Skill 8 is about efficiently retrieving and recording information from non-fiction sources. The final three skills, marked with an asterisk, indicate objectives specifically for Years 5 and 6: making comparisons within and across books (Skill 9), discussing and evaluating authors' use of language, including figurative language, and its impact on the reader (Skill 10), and distinguishing between statements of fact and opinion (Skill 11).