Reading comprehension Year 6 – Inference practice questions

What's included?

PDF file (11 pages)

Key Stage

KS2

Age

Years 5-6

Subjects

English

Of the 50 marks available in the Year 6 reading comprehension paper, 30–35 per cent involve inference.

Use these worksheets from Comprehension Ninja: Inference and Beyond for Upper KS2 to hone your pupils’ inference skills across all the SATs question formats. The questions refer to a fun extract from Oh Maya Gods! by Maz Evans.

Quick tips for reading comprehension Year 6 success

Simple questions

Remind pupils that these questions relate to the actions or emotions of the characters in the text.

Sentence inference

The children should focus on the actions and emotions and try to draw on their own experiences to imagine how characters in the text might feel, act or think.

This suggests…

Check that pupils understand that ‘this suggests’ simply means ‘this shows that’ or ‘this means’.

Evidence: two inferences

Pupils will need to reflect on their own understanding of what an upset child looks like and then look for clues that suggest this in the text (e.g. ‘they were crying’ or ‘they couldn’t catch their breath’).

Evidence: three inferences

Teach pupils to read the question and the instructions provided carefully. Make sure they know to check whether the question references the whole text, or just part of it.

Evidence: impression and evidence

Expose pupils to these questions early on – they are actually fairly simple and should not be feared.

Teach pupils to provide, in their own words, a simple impression or opinion. Quite often, the impression box will be a one-word description, such as happy, anxious, excited, old, etc. In the evidence box, pupils just need to provide evidence from the text to support their impression. For example, if their impression was ‘it’s old’, the evidence in the text might be, ‘the walls were crumbling.’ That’s it.