Becoming a Better Reader with Blooms
We encourage all children to become skilled at asking questions at St Michael’s Primary and we use Bloom’s Taxonomy to support this across all subjects, in particular with reading.
Reading at home is a guaranteed way to improve your child’s reading. We have devised a bookmark to help you support your child with their understanding and comprehension when reading at home.
Whilst it is important to develop fluency of reading, it is also vital that we develop other reading skills to help children fully appreciate different types of texts.
Ways to encourage reading at home:
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Read to your child – or use audio books if this is difficult.
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Read a range of texts – notes you have written, instructions etc and build it into every part of your daily routine.
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Be a good reading role model
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Ask your child a range of questions whilst they are reading using their Bloom’s bookmark
Bloom’s Bookmark:
The bookmark has a range of question starters which can be applied to all books, you only need to pick one, or maybe two, questions per session to check your child’s understanding and to engage them in conversation about their reading.
For a more advanced reader, you may get them to create their own questions.
- Red questions establish facts and basic understanding – Knowing and Explaining*
- Yellow questions get children thinking about using what they know - Applying
- Green questions allow children to focus on details and look closely - Analysing
- Blue questions get children to say what they think and give an opinion- Evaluating
- Purple questions encourage children to create and imaging - Innovating
- All types of questions are important.
If a child can answer a purple question they must have all of the previous thinking skills covered.
We also have more detailed questions prompts available.
