Designed to help students develop their comprehension skills and prepare for the NSW Selective High School Placement Test

A cloze passage requires students to make sense of the meaning and grammar of the surrounding words in order to fill in gaps in the text. In this book, designed for Years 5 and 6, students are challenged to match deleted sentences with the correct gaps in a given passage. Texts are authored specifically to require students to use a range of higher-order comprehension skills, including identifying the main idea and making connections between ideas.

An introductory chapter offers tips and tricks on how to approach the activities – for example, identifying topic sentences and patterns of text organisation, and understanding connectives and other details – before providing some practice questions with worked solutions. Students will then work through 30 cloze practice units across 3 themed chapters: Earth Wind Fire Water, Technology, and Human Society and Culture. Each chapter is designed to increase in difficulty.

Contents

Earth Wind Fire Water

An island is born
The sands of time
Good fire, bad fire
Tornado, hurricane, cyclone
Karst: Ten per cent of the earth
Colours in the sky
What is this I see sparkling in the dirt?
The Iguazú Falls
Renewable energy
Give us a wave!

Technology

Why aren’t we already living in space?
Cloud seeding
Robot teachers?
Oh, to live forever!
The role of technology in espionage
Planned obsolescence
3D printing
Chicken made in a lab
Autonomous vehicles
Terraforming

Human Society and Culture

The power of pop culture
Dragons
The mystery of mass hysteria
The Olympic Games: economic boom or doom?
Superhero obsession
Once upon a time: the evolution of fairy tales
The gift economy
Fast fashion
IQ and EQ
Conspiracy theories

About the Authors

Janelle Ho has worked in education for 30 years. She started her career teaching gifted and talented teenagers for a decade, before moving into assessments. In the last two decades, her job has been in developing international literacy assessments. She is currently Head of Education at EduVision.

With over a decade of experience preparing students for Selective, Scholarship and OC exams, Tysan Allen is the co-founder, director and head teacher of EduVision, where he teaches enrichment writing and reading comprehension classes.