English Comprehension KS2 BY Ilm Tuition- Book Review

I was kindly sent the English Comprehension KS2 Book One by Ilm Tuition in exchange for a review.However all thoughts and opinions are my own.

So What is Reading Comprehension ? “Comprehension is the understanding and interpretation of what is read. To be able to accurately understand written material, children need to be able to (1) decode what they read; (2) make connections between what they read and what they already know; and (3) think deeply about what they have read. ” As Ilm Tuiton says: “Reading Comprehension is an important skill to develop and can be transferred and used in all areas of learning. This series of comprehension exercises will help your child build vocabulary and deepen their understanding via inferencing, deduction and other related skills”.

Reading Comprehension is a big part of the British National Curriculum. Although, as a home educator, I am not obliged to follow it, I personally have been doing reading comprehension with my 10.5 year old daughter in a more formal way for just over year. If she were to be in school, she would be in Year 6.

We were nearly finishing the CGP KS2 English Comprehension year 6 Targeted Question book, when Ilm Tuition asked me to review their “English Comprehension KS2 book“. It could not have come at a more perfect time.

I really like the selection of texts. It contains some great classics such as ” The wind in the willows”, ” The Railway Children as well as modern examples ranging from fiction and non-fiction. There are ten texts in total.

Each comprehension text starts with a Cloze Exercise, in which the child has to fill in the blank spaces with the appropriate word, followed by a vocab and spelling exercise. The child has to read the text and write the words that they are unfamiliar with , learn the spelling and find the definition of the words. This is a great exercise for independent work and a great opportunity for your child to use a Dictionary. I often encourage this this with my children instead of using the phone and finding the meaning. There are around 9/10 exam – style questions for each comprehension text.

What I absolutely loved about the book is that unlike other comprehension books, the answer section doesn’t just give the answers but it shows how they arrived at them with evidence from the extracts. This is brilliant as well because it truly enables children to think and develop various strategies and techniques to figure out the meaning from the context rather than memorise.

I also liked the overall layout of the book- simple and easy to to use and follow. This is definitely a challenging and very well thought book. It is geared for children aged 9 and above and will certainly be a great support for any children, who are sitting the 11+, Common Entrance and SATs preparations.