Cracking Comprehension

I love it! I've been using the Reception level for my class and it's been great. Giving the children lots of confidence as it progresses gradually. I love the structure that Cracking Comprehension offers while still being flexible. The teaching guides and interactive texts offer an opportunity to delve deep into a text. They also really support children's learning. My favourite part of Cracking Comprehension is the wonderful texts! My class have really enjoyed it, I asked them what they thought of the resource. One pupil said it's helping her to learn and be able to read 'wee bits.' Another thinks it's fun. And one of the other pupils said it's a bit like a guessing game and it's fun. They have really enjoyed the practice text as well as the interactive part!

Cracking Comprehension has resulted in all children in Year 6, (56 pupils) achieving a minimum of 100 on the scaled score and an average scaled score for the cohort of 109.1. As a school, for the last 7 years we have consistently achieved very good results (and extremely good progress) in KS2 SATs, however reading has always been the weakest of these results. Consequently, for a few years we have been looking at new ways to teach comprehension effectively. Last year we used Cracking Comprehension as a direct tool to teach comprehension skills. Initially, the children found the questions difficult, however because of the style of the lessons – interactive fun and with a pace determined by the teachers – the children soon began to find that they were successful in developing their inference and deduction skills.

We have been using the Cracking Comprehension resource with our junior children. It provides the teacher with a step-by-step guide to improve comprehension skills in children whilst increasing both their engagement and motivation levels. It allows children to explore a wide range of texts and equips them with a plethora of opportunities to extend their enjoyment and engagement with reading. The units of learning provide different teaching styles from whole class to independent work, group work and also very importantly extension opportunities. As a school we find the assessment tasks an extremely valuable resource to assess comprehension skills across a range of genres. The clear assessment guidance identifies strengths and weaknesses by Assessment focus.

We chose this resource as we wanted ready-made texts with appropriate questions to enable us to teach how to dissect a text through use of before, during and after reading strategies. Through the questions we are able to model and develop pupils’ skills in approaching a question, understanding what it is asking of them, locating relevant parts of the passage etc. The online package enables modelling of skills through highlighting, recording evidence and matching how close the pupil has got to the answer. The practice texts are extremely useful as well. Before we got this programme we had to try and create our own questions to go with texts we had, but now we know we have ready-made well researched texts and questions tthat dramtically reduce our techaers' workload. I would absolutely recommend Cracking Comprhension to any primary school.