Florence Nightingale Reading Comprehension KS1

The life of Florence Nightingale at three KS1 reading levels – the Lady with the Lamp, the hospital at Scutari, her school for nurses and how her facts and numbers helped – with questions for each level, a life-in-order sequencing page, a hospitals then-and-now sort, vocabulary work and full answers. Print-ready PDF, 12 pages.

“The lives of significant individuals in the past” is a KS1 history requirement, and Florence Nightingale is one of the named examples. This pack lets the whole class read her story together, with each child working at the right level.

What’s included (12-page A4 PDF):

• Teacher notes with a level guide, National Curriculum links and a “key facts at a glance” table
• Level 1 (about 140 words, very large print, word bank): born in Florence, wanting to be a nurse, the war, cleaning the hospital, the Lady with the Lamp – 8 questions, including tick-the-answer, true/false and a picture to draw
• Level 2 (about 230 words, word bank): the Crimean War, the hospital at Scutari, what the nurses did, Notes on Nursing, the nursing school and International Nurses Day – 8 questions
• Level 3 (about 250 words): evidence about Florence, the Sanitary Commission, her rose diagram and the Order of Merit – 7 questions, including true/false
• Florence’s life in order: number 6 event cards, plus a “think about it” question
• Hospitals then and now: sort 8 sentences into 1854 and today, then write your own
• Florence words: match 6 words to their meanings; why do we still remember her?
• Answers for every question

Answer lines are sized for KS1 handwriting (about 5 mm per letter).

The history is checked against BBC Bitesize (Who was Florence Nightingale? and the KS3 page on her impact on healthcare), the National Army Museum’s “Florence Nightingale: The Lady with the Lamp”, the Florence Nightingale Museum’s biography and Wikipedia for dates. Where sources differ, the texts take the more careful view: the death rate at Scutari fell after the Sanitary Commission repaired the sewers in 1855, so the pack does not claim that Florence alone saved the soldiers.

Name/date line on question pages. British English spelling. Clear, dyslexia-friendly font (Andika). Simple original illustrations.

This resource was created with AI assistance (Claude), then fact-checked and proofread in a separate review pass.