Reading Activities — printable reading & comprehension activities for the classroom

Printable reading & comprehension activities

Reading Activities is a set of 29 ready-to-print reading and comprehension activities for the classroom. Pick one, model it on the whiteboard with the class, then print an A4 PDF worksheet for every pupil. They work with any book, text or topic — from blackout poetry and hexagonal thinking to emotion graphs and point-evidence-explain — and there is no sign-up and no email to print a sheet. Every one now has a page of its own with the lesson written up: how to run it, what usually goes wrong, and which year groups it suits.

The activities

Getting to know a character

• Character Motivation — map who wants what from whom, and why they do what they do.
• Character Traits — sort words by whether a character always, sometimes or never is them.
• Venn Diagram — compare two characters — and argue about what they actually share.
• Character Acrostic — an acrostic of a character's name, built from evidence.

Following the story

• Timeline of Events — the key events in order, and what each one does to the characters.
• Emotion Graph — plot how one emotion rises and falls, chapter by chapter.
• Tension Graph — rate how tense each chapter is, and justify the number.

Digging for evidence

• Point, Evidence, Explain — build an answer that doesn't stop halfway.
• Theme Tree — root a theme and prove it on every branch.
• Traffic Lights — true, false or in-between statements, written for a partner.
• Hexagonal Thinking — link ideas on hexagons and justify every edge that touches.
• Carroll Diagram — sort by two questions at once, with your own headings.

Working with the words

• Blackout Poetry — black out a passage to leave the poem hiding in it.
• Word Classes — colour-code a real passage by noun, verb, adjective and adverb.
• Hamburger Paragraph — build a paragraph in layers, and remember the bottom bun.
• Making Connections — link the book to the children's own lives, without going shallow.

Mood, response and creative work

• Mood Board — gather the colours, textures and words that carry a scene's atmosphere.
• Reaction Quotes — pick the line that stayed with you, and unpick why.
• Book Soundtrack — choose the music for a scene and justify the mood behind it.
• Colour, Symbol, Image — represent a text three ways without words.
• Role-Play Dialogue — write the scene as speech, then punctuate it properly.

Comparing, rating and summarising

• Character Radars — score several characters on the same traits and compare the shapes.
• Radar Chart — weigh the themes in a book against each other, out of ten.
• Book Connections — compare two books, or a book and its film.
• Headlines — squeeze a whole scene into a newspaper headline.
• The 4 Cs — connect, challenge, concept, change. Best with non-fiction.
• Stickman Inference — separate what the text says from what you worked out.

Vocabulary

• Illustrated Vocabulary — draw a new word and use it in a sentence.
• Emotion Hunt — two dozen feeling words on cards, to stretch past happy and sad.

Frequently asked questions

Related apps

More for English lessons: ESL & Oracy for speaking games, Spelling Lists for weekly words, and Lexicon for vocabulary building.