Reading: what the paper asks, and what we teach for it
The Department publishes how long this section runs, how many answers it asks for and the rules a child sits it under. Here is that structure, one real question from the app, and the eight lessons that cover it.
What this section is
Reading sits inside two placement tests, sat at different ages, and each has its own length:
- Opportunity Class, sat in Year 4: 40 minutes for 33 answers across 14 questions, three of which have more than one part.
- Selective High School, sat in Year 6: 45 minutes for 38 answers across 17 questions, three of which have more than one part.
The test is sat on a computer supplied by the department, and paper is provided for working out. Nothing is deducted for a wrong answer, so a guess is never worse than a blank: the practice papers tell a child so in their own instructions. None of that is our description of the section. The counts and timings above are the Department's, published on its practice-test pages for the Opportunity Class and Selective High School tests, where those practice papers are also free to download, and what happens on the day is on its placement test page.
What we teach for it
Eight lessons, each built around one real thing the section asks a child to do.
- Word Forge: prefixes, roots and suffixes, so an unfamiliar word can be worked out rather than guessed at.
- Clue Hunter: inference, evidence, and the trap answers that look right but are not.
- The Gap in the Story: how one sentence is chosen to fit a gap in a passage, by following pronoun trails and signal words.
- The Poetry Corner: reading a poem twice, once for the story and once for what it means underneath.
- The Reading Room: four short texts and one statement: whose is it?
- The Perfect Word: choosing the one word, out of four that almost fit, that a sentence actually needs.
- The Author's Trick: what a writer is doing with a line, and why, rather than just naming the device.
- Punctuation Repair Shop: fixing apostrophes, commas that change meaning, and run-on sentences.
A question, quoted whole
One question from The Perfect Word, exactly as a child sees it in the app, hint and explanation included.
"The moment the bus pulled away, the whole team ___ into song."
Which word fits the gap?
- Aburst
- Bcracked
- Csnapped
- Dsplit
Hint: Which word suggests something bottled up suddenly getting out?
Why A. 'Burst into song' carries the feeling of the singing escaping all at once, which is why we also burst into tears and into laughter. The other three break things open too, but they break hard objects, and none of them takes 'into song'.
What else is in there
Two of the eight are not reading comprehension on their own, and they sit here anyway. Word Forge builds the vocabulary a passage assumes rather than testing comprehension directly, and Punctuation Repair Shop fixes the marks that stop a reader having to guess, which is writing mechanics rather than reading. Both live under this heading in the app because a growing reader needs them regardless of what any single section covers, so the lessons reach a little past the section into skills that carry over everywhere else.