This Year 6 reading comprehension unit centres on the original poem Together Again by award-winning professional poet Joshua Seigal.
The poem’s vivid imagery and emotional depth bring the theme of reconciliation to life. This makes it an ideal text to develop pupils’ comprehension, empathy and vocabulary skills.
The poem itself is provided in multiple formats – including illustrated and plain PDFs, plus PowerPoints both with and without highlighted text. These options support varied teaching styles and classroom needs.
Careful scaffolding
The resource pack offers a rich, carefully scaffolded teaching sequence designed to deepen pupils’ understanding through layered reading approaches.
These include model reading, echo reading, choral reading, and ‘jump-in’ reading, helping teachers to adapt to the needs of their class.
The pack highlights opportunities for drama, discussion and visualisation to bring the poem’s themes and emotions to life, encouraging pupils to connect personally with the text.
Two key vocabulary lessons focus explicitly on the words severed and constricted, helping pupils to explore definitions and usage in both literal and metaphorical contexts. These lessons include PowerPoint slides and follow-up worksheets that challenge pupils to use the vocabulary creatively in their writing.
Beyond vocabulary, the unit incorporates comprehension activities that build essential skills such as retrieval, sequencing, inference and prediction.
Pupils also engage in deeper analysis through Big Questions worksheets, personal response tasks and visualisation activities like diary writing and emotion graphing. Role play and paired discussion tasks help pupils explore character emotions and motivations, making the poem’s reconciliation theme tangible.
This resource is part of the Real Comprehension programme, which provides thematic fiction, nonfiction, and poetry units designed to foster deeper reading comprehension across KS1 and KS2.
Resources include:
- Together Again poem in illustrated and plain PDFs
- PowerPoint presentations of the poem with optional highlights
- Annotated teacher’s copy with close reading notes and prompts
- Two explicit vocabulary lessons focusing on ‘severed’ and ‘constricted’
- Worksheets for diary writing, similes/metaphors, emotion graphing, and personal response
- Big Questions comprehension discussion sheets
- Revisit-the-text activities with true/false, sequencing, and alternative title tasks
- Full, detailed teaching notes supporting all activities and reading approaches