Diamond
About Diamond Band
Readers of the Diamond book bands will be reading books with a much wider vocabulary, understanding a wider range of language used by authors and story books that have developed plots and characters. Also, non-fiction books which use more formal language and technical vocabulary.
How to support your child reading Diamond level books
Children should be encouraged to work out any unfamiliar word. They should focus on all the letters in a word and relate to their phonics and spelling rules of common letter strings, suffixes and prefixes to decode a word and use the context to understand its meaning.
When reading with or to children, attention should be paid to new vocabulary – both a word’s meaning(s) and its correct pronunciation.
You can support them by:
- checking that the book makes sense to them, discussing their understanding and exploring the meaning of words in context
- asking questions to improve their understanding
- drawing inferences such as inferring characters’ feelings, thoughts and motives from their actions, and justifying inferences with evidence
- predicting what might happen from details stated and implied
- summarising the main ideas drawn from more than 1 paragraph, identifying key details that support the main ideas
- identifying how language, structure and presentation contribute to meaning
- discuss and evaluate how authors use language, including figurative language, considering the impact on the reader
- distinguish between statements of fact and opinion
- retrieve information from non-fiction.