This Year 6 reading comprehension unit is based on Coventry Cathedral, an original non-fiction text by children’s author Jo Franklin.
The text recounts the destruction of Coventry during the Blitz and how its people responded with a powerful message of forgiveness and reconciliation.
With themes of war, peace, faith and renewal, it offers a rich opportunity for pupils to develop both their comprehension skills and their emotional literacy.
The resource pack provides a full teaching sequence and comes with lots of high-quality resources. Pupils revisit the text through layered reading strategies – including model, choral, paired and jump-in reads.
These encourage them to explore their emotional responses, make inferences and develop empathy through drama, discussion and visualisation. Annotated versions of the text help teachers guide pupils through close reading, focusing on points for clarification, reflection and deeper understanding.
Explicit vocabulary teaching
Explicit vocabulary teaching is woven throughout the lessons, with focused PowerPoints for the words situated, reconciliation and subsequent. Pupils are encouraged to explore meaning and context, and to compose their own sentences using these words.
Additional worksheets and PowerPoints build retrieval, sequencing, prediction and inference skills, while helping children connect the events of the text to their own experiences and the wider world.
Activities include generating questions, emotion graphing, comparing the two cathedrals, and looking at how communities respond to trauma with peace and hope.
This unit is part of the Real Comprehension whole-school programme, which provides high-quality fiction, non-fiction and poetry texts to teach reading comprehension across KS1 and KS2.
This Year 6 reading comprehension resource pack includes:
- Original text PDFs – plain (ink-saver); illustrated; annotated
- Original text PowerPoints – with and without highlights
- Resourced teaching sequences – with vocabulary PPTs
- Revisit the text resources
- Big Questions PowerPoints and worksheets
- Assorted worksheets, including: Questioning characters; Visualising the charred remains
- Full teaching notes for non-fiction unit on Coventry Cathedral