Year 4 – Supporting Children in English

• Supports home learning

Reading and Comprehension

Word reading:

• Practise recognising Year 3/4 words – make up silly sentences with the words. You can find a list of the Year 3/4 words at the end of this ‘I Can Statements’ resource.
• Encourage using spelling patterns and known words to decipher unknown words, as well as the context of the writing and checking for sense.

Comprehension:

• Expose children to a range of books – find ones that interest and excite them and from genres that they may not naturally be drawn to.
• Explore the VIPERS/Reading Content Domains approach to comprehension questions. This offers lots of ideas to get children thinking about what they read and what is read to them.
• Ask questions about books without interrupting the flow.
• Model reading aloud, using voices and expression, and correct yourself openly – this teaches children to correct themselves, which is a sign that they understand the text they are reading as they know when it doesn’t make sense! This is a sign of a good reader.
• Question yourself around word meanings or plot elements – ask a question out loud and work through how you are answering it.
• Challenge children with inference questions by working through the process of looking for clues in the text, explaining that these require detective mode. You can find a definition and examples of inference questions in this slideshow.
• Offer strategies for question forms – for example, if they encounter a question asking them to define an unknown word, suggest they read the sentence before and after, as well as the one with the word, in order to give them contextual clues. Suggest they also look at the word itself and think about related or possible root words.