Books for Comprehension

Building Comprehension skills (understanding what you read) can be very tricky. It relies on us being able to make up age/stage appropriate questions for our kids and guiding them through the answers.

While this is certainly doable, it's also not easy.

In fact, I often get asked by parents in the Raising Readers Community if I recommend anything to help, particularly for Year 1 and 2 kids.

While I don't usually recommend workbooks as, in most cases, kids learn best through short and sweet sessions (preferably games), when it comes to comprehension, things are a little different. You need loads of different, short, texts for your child to read and it can be tricky to come up with specific comprehension questions to challenge them.

The only workbooks I recommend are the CGP Comprehension books (specifically for our Year 1/2 kids - Kids in Reception are usually too young to focus on these and make significantly larger progress by learning through play.)

They offer loads of bits and pieces that scale perfectly to challenge your little one, with each one taking between 5-10 minutes to complete (in my experience - if your child takes longer, I'd pause and either leave it there, or come back to it later).

I'd recommend doing maybe 1/week so your child doesn't feel overwhelmed.

I've linked a few of the books below, in case you want to grab them: