This Year 6 reading comprehension unit centres around the original fiction text Better Than a Box of Gold by acclaimed children’s author Jon Mayhew.
The story follows a young boy, evacuated from the city to a village during the Blitz. He encounters an old war veteran who offers a powerful lesson on forgiveness and reconciliation.
You can also use this text as a model text (WAGOLL) to support KS2 writing development.
The resource pack provides both illustrated and plain versions of the text for varied classroom use. Options include PDFs and PowerPoint presentations – with or without text highlights to support reading engagement and focus.
We've included a detailed, annotated version of the text to guide you during close reading. This highlights opportunities for drama, discussion and visualisation that help deepen pupils’ comprehension and connection to the story’s emotional and historical context.
Flexible teaching sequence
The teaching sequence is flexible and responsive to pupils’ needs. It incorporates various reading approaches such as model reading, choral reading, paired reading and ‘jump-in’ reads. This range supports fluency and engagement while promoting discussion and personal response. Teachers can adapt these methods based on the group’s abilities or preferences.
Three vocabulary-focused lessons form a core part of the unit, exploring key words in context: ‘scalded’, ‘gesture’, and ‘witless’. These sessions include explicit vocabulary PowerPoints that develop understanding of meaning, culminating in pupils composing their own sentences.
Resourced activities
The unit offers a rich range of resourced activities to build essential comprehension skills, including retrieval, sequencing, prediction and inference.
For example, pupils create ‘Role on the Wall’ diagrams to explore character perspectives, use thought bubbles and freeze frames to dramatise key scenes, and draw comparisons between the city and village settings to develop visualisation skills.
Throughout, ‘Big Questions’ worksheets and PowerPoints encourage pupils to think critically, express opinions and make personal and wider world connections.
Additional resources support revisiting and consolidating understanding with activities like ‘Difficult Easy’ questions, personal response prompts, and emotion graphing to trace characters' feelings throughout the story. These help pupils reflect on complex emotions and moral lessons embedded in the text.
This comprehensive Year 6 fiction comprehension unit stands alone or fits well within a wider thematic reading programme, including poetry and non-fiction texts exploring similar themes.
It is part of the Real Comprehension whole-school scheme, which offers progressive, thematic reading comprehension units for KS1 and KS2 to support deeper understanding across year groups.
The pack includes:
- Original text PDFs: plain (ink-saver), illustrated, and annotated
- PowerPoint versions of the text: with and without highlights
- Three-part resourced teaching sequence, each with explicit vocabulary PowerPoints
- ‘Big Questions’ worksheets and PowerPoints for discussion and reflection
- Character and setting worksheets such as Role on the Wall, thought bubbles, and descriptive tasks
- Revisiting-the-text resources including sequencing, personal response, and emotion graphing activities
- Comprehensive teaching notes guiding lesson delivery and differentiation
Together, these materials provide a detailed and flexible framework for teaching reading comprehension through engaging fiction that explores historical context, human emotions and moral growth.