Developing Reading Comprehension Skills Years 5-6: Classic Poetry is a flexible teaching resource designed to give children a greater understanding of poems, and to increase their confidence in answering questions about poems in the KS2 SATs.

It introduces children in upper Key Stage 2 to carefully selected classic poems, which have stood the test of time. Their meaning is universal and timeless: as true now as it was when they were first written. 

The resource will help pupils to develop a love of poetry by introducing them to a world where playing with language is the norm and there are a multitude of right answers. Through exploring the language and themes of the poems, pupils will find out more about themselves and the world around them.

The activities help to guide children through the poems, providing them with opportunities to understand the poet's choice of vocabulary, widen their knowledge of synonyms, develop understanding of challenging language devices and practise their reading comprehension skills. 

All the activities are linked to the eight question types for the reading content domain that appear in the KS2 Reading SATs papers: vocabulary, retrieval, summary, inference, prediction, text meaning, author's use of language and compare and contrast. Through working through the activities, pupils will develop an understanding of the type of answer required for each question type and will become more confident at answering these types of question.

The flexibility of this resource means that you can choose to use it in many different ways. Whether you choose to use it for whole class sessions, smaller teacher-led sessions or for independent tasks, you can be sure that pupils will be learning some wonderful classic poems and improving their comprehension skills.

The book contains the following classic poetry:

Night Clouds by Amy Lowell

An Autumn Evening by Lucy Maud Montgomery

In Flanders Fields by John McCrae

Leisure by W.H. Davies

In the Bleak Midwinter by Christina Rossetti

The Way Through the Woods by Rudyard Kipling

"Hope" is the Thing with Feathers by Emily Dickinson

The Highwayman by Alfred Noyes

The Listeners by Walter de la Mare

North of Time by Rachel Field

The Tyger by William Blake

A Musical Instrument by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

This book is the second book in a series of 8 Developing Reading Comprehension Skills through ... and a companion for Classic Children's Literature, Years 5-6

The other books will be:

Classic Children's Literature, Years 3-4

Classic Poetry, Years 3-4

Contemporary Children's Literature, Years 5-6

Contemporary Children's Literature, Years 3-4

Non-fiction, Years 5-6

Non-fiction, Years 3-4