This Year 2 reading comprehension unit is based on A Very Inventive Family, a funny and imaginative original text by children’s author Ross Montgomery.
It offers a fully resourced, carefully sequenced series of lessons designed to develop pupils’ comprehension, vocabulary, visualisation and inference skills through close engagement with the text.
The story, broken into three parts, follows Anita and her chaotic family of inventors. They create one malfunctioning gadget after another – from the Egg-O-Matic to drone-powered school delivery.
The pack includes three structured lessons. Each has a vocabulary focus (on the words light, immediately and malfunctioning). This is alongside whole-text tasks designed to prompt personal response and deeper thinking.
We support your teaching with an annotated version of the text, showing opportunities for clarification, discussion, drama and visualisation.
These prompts will help pupils understand the text’s humour, characterisation and language use. Additional worksheets and PowerPoints develop key comprehension strategies such as sequencing, retrieval, prediction and making connections.
You'll invite children to explore the characters and scenes through techniques such as freeze frames, role on the wall and visual description, while follow-up worksheets ask them to reflect on emotional responses and key events.
Opportunities to revisit and respond to the whole text include a personal response worksheet, an emotions graph and ‘Difficult Easy’ comprehension questions.
The unit forms part of the Real Comprehension programme, which provides high-quality fiction, non-fiction and poetry texts to support reading comprehension across KS1 and KS2.
This Year 2 reading comprehension pack includes:
- Original story by Ross Montgomery in PDF (plain, illustrated, and annotated)
- Story PowerPoints (with and without highlights)
- Vocabulary Focus PowerPoints
- Big Questions PowerPoints and worksheets for each lesson
- Three fully resourced teaching sequences
- Role on the Wall and visualisation activities
- ‘Revisit the text’ worksheets
- Full teaching notes