Reading Masters
We believe that comprehension skills should be developed through regular exposure to a wide range of text types.
At Jubilee, we do this through our tailored comprehension programme, ‘Reading Masters’.
Each year group focuses on a different text each week, making lots of connections with their wider learning. Comprehension skills are taught explicitly throughout the week in line with National Curriculum objectives as follows:
Monday – Explorers
The children explore their new text in depth with their teacher, discussing its purpose, audience and features, then annotating and producing a glossary of key vocabulary they’ll use throughout the week. They then answer prediction questions.
Tuesday – Authors
The children focus on the author/poet’s use of language, answering questions about the words and phrases used in the text to meet Key Stage-appropriate objectives.
Wednesday – Hunters
The children develop their retrieval skills answering questions for which they must locate information directly from the text.
Thursday – Detectives
The children develop their inference skills, answering questions that require them to use clues from the text and their existing knowledge.
Friday – Key Stage 1 – Organisers
The children summarise what they have read and sequence events from the text.
Friday – Key Stage 2 – Commentators
The children summarise the main ideas from more than one paragraph, explain how information and narrative content contributes to wider meaning and make comparisons within the text. They also have regular opportunities to explain their understanding and comment on key elements of what they have read.
Challenge through comprehension
Differentiation in Reading Masters is predominantly done through support and outcome. We aim to provide the children with questions that elicit metacognitive thinking regularly and encourage them to use evidence to justify their inferences.
In Year 2, we focus on enabling children to read and understand texts independently, and become used to answering comprehension questions of each type, building their knowledge of text types and features.
As they move through the school, the children become more independent in reading and responding to questions. We focus on advancing their understanding of themes and conventions in different text types, making links and comparisons within and between texts and genres, and supporting them to provide reasoned justification of their views.
Children currently, or targeted to be, working at a greater depth in each year group attend reading booster groups in which they explore higher-level texts deeply in a small group.
