5 reading intervention strategies for struggling readers in KS2

Teacher Steph Rhodes shares her top five tips on how to crack reading interventions in KS2 through emphasis on fluency, summarising and use of high-quality texts.

Getting reading interventions right can be tricky, but if you can crack it, then you have a winner on your hands! Across Key Stage 2, there are so many domains and different texts that it can be easy to get “lost” in it all.

There is a whole wealth of information out there about reading in schools - reading for pleasure, reading for purpose, reading across the curriculum - that it is sometimes hard to know where to start for those children who it just isn’t “clicking” for. We also all know that there is so much that goes into “successful” reading, and that there are a lot of moving parts, so how do we get it right?

5 reading intervention tips

Having worked in year 6 for a few years now and really delving into research around reading, I’ve come up with 5 top tips that I wish I had 5 years ago! 

1. Fluency, fluency, fluency

It sounds so simple now, but there is no harm in reading something more than once. Doing this means that children become more familiar with the text and therefore more confident. If you’re running an intervention session over the course of a week, don’t think you have to change the text every day; the more familiar we are with a piece of text, the more we will be able to do with it! I definitely fell into the trap of “a different text every day” when I initially started leading reading interventions, but now, I follow a pretty similar pattern to my interventions over a week:

• Day 1 - Reading the text: whichever adult is leading the intervention reads the text to the children so it is modelled correctly. The adult points out expression, intonation, punctuation etc. so the children know how it should sound. Following this, children then have a go at reading to each other (this could be chorally or in pairs). If time allows, they should read it more than once. 

• Day 2 - Skimming, scanning and summarising: start by reading the text again (thus embedding that fluency element). Look at retrieval and vocabulary skills - starting simple, building to more complex. This will also help to develop children’s skimming and scanning skills. To end the session, children think about summarising the text in a word/sentence (I’ll get to more on this in my next top tip!)

• Day 3 - Delving deeper: start today by summarising the text - talk about the characters, the plot, the themes. Once again, read the text. Now the children know this text SO WELL that they can start to think about those inference and prediction skills (how do you know this character is mean/kind? Why did they do the thing they did?)

2. Don’t overlook summarising

Now THIS I did overlook at first. After talking to a fellow teacher who told me they started every session with some summarising, I realised that this TINY tweak helped the children to fully form the story or text in their mind better than I ever expected. Summarising matters so much! If you’re not already starting a session with some summarising, then I implore you to add it in and just watch their skills improve drastically. If you want your children to become better readers, better "seers" of stories, and better connection makers, then they need to be able to see a story (or at least what you’ve read of it) in its fullest form. What about trying these ideas:

• Start your lesson with “What happened to _____ in the last chapter?” or “How has the relationship between ____ and ____ changed since the start of the story?”

• Ask children to summarise the chapter or extract in a sentence or a word - you could ask them to think about one particular element of the text so far (i.e. the mood, the relationship, the plot). This leads quite nicely to some justification too!

Related content:

9 exciting ways to teach reading for pleasure
7 tips for success with the KS2 SATs reading paper
KS2 SATs 2025: reading paper analysis

3. Text choice matters

We are incredibly lucky as educators now that we are in a world where there are books about everything, for everyone! From graphic novels and wordless picture books to illustrated novels and chapter extracts, we have a wealth of texts at our fingertips. It’s important that the texts chosen complement the learning in the classroom. There's all kinds of advice out there about choosing texts with appropriate content, length, and difficulty, but here are some of mine:

• Don’t be afraid to use graphic novels and illustrated novels - for our struggling readers, these can be a brilliant “in” and they can help to develop some wonderful inference skills in particular (there’s lots of “show, don’t tell” in graphic novels)

• Use authentic texts if you can - go and visit local museums if you’re doing a study about your local area and ask if they have any leaflets you can have. Doing a travel unit? Use brochures. Learning about a specific kind of history? Can you find some information on a museum website?

• Remember to use a range of texts - we all are guilty of falling into the trap of only using fiction, but it’s important that children look at a wide range of non-fiction texts (some really important learning around structures and purpose comes out of these) and that lesser-used poetry!

4. Ensure reading is part of your daily routine

I highly recommend, if you don’t already, making time to read aloud to your children every day. Find 10-15 minutes and make it non-negotiable. Before break or lunch, have you got 10 minutes to spare? Great: grab yourself a book and start reading to your children. Those children in your reading intervention group will be hearing DOUBLE the amount of well-modelled reading aloud (once in their reading intervention and now from you daily). Include the children in choosing the text if you want to! You could hold a Book World Cup or have voting stations. 

5. Task design, not task completion!

Is it important for these children in your intervention to have exposure to questions they may be asked in a test? Yes, but that shouldn’t be your be-all and end-all. Whilst those comprehension-style questions should be important, it’s also crucial that children have a chance to explore the reading domains (retrieving, predicting, summarising, sequencing etc) in more creative ways. Here are just a few simple but effective ideas I’ve used that have a real impact during intervention sessions:

• Drawing the vocabulary: you’ve just had a lovely discussion around the tricky vocabulary in the text - can the children try and draw the meaning or draw the word in the context?

• Describing the relationships: if you’ve got a story with multiple characters, can the children draw the relationships between them? (This could be in the form of a family tree or linking diagram.) Tasks like these really show what the children have picked up!

• Comic strip it! Children LOVE when you ask them to turn something into a comic strip, because it’s fun! 

• Matching games: this doesn’t feel like work to the children, but it can be a brilliant way of reducing the cognitive overload if they’re matching questions to answers, descriptions to characters, and characters to names. 

Reading interventions are a crucial thing to get right for our children, and can have a massive impact! They need purpose and careful planning - by putting the consideration in beforehand, you should reap the benefits. You could just change that child’s life! 

You can trial LbQ's Wayfinder for free and expose your KS2 pupils to a wide variety of high-quality extracts and questions, as well as curriculum aligned reading assessments. This means continuous formative assessment for them and crucial data with zero marking for you!