Reading & Literacy
16 articles in this category
After the Year 1 Phonics Check: What to Do Next at Home
After the phonics check: start with the teacher, a few minutes a day on decoding, what not to do, keeping sound games going and when an assessment helps.
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Reading Your Child's Year 1 Phonics Check Results: What They Mean
What the Phonics Check measures and what it doesn't, why half the words are made up, what 28 out of 40 means and when a low score needs a closer look.
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Phonological Awareness Activities: A Parent Guide
Clapping games, rhyme hunts and sound-spotting: phonological awareness activities by age, from three-year-old syllables to Prep phonemes.
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What Is Phonological Awareness? Pre-Reading Skills
Phonological awareness moves from words to syllables to rhyme to single sounds. The order, the rough ages, and what to listen for at home.
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Teaching Concepts About Print: Parent Strategies
Pointing to words as you read, talking about letters and the gaps between them: how print referencing during shared reading builds print awareness.
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Concepts About Print: Essential Pre-Reading Skills
Holding the book the right way, reading left to right, knowing print carries meaning: the print concepts children pick up before they read a word.
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The Simple View of Reading in Australian Schools
Where the Simple View of Reading shows up in the Australian Curriculum, the shift to structured literacy, and questions worth asking your child's school.
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The Simple View of Reading: How Children Learn
Reading comprehension = decoding x language comprehension. The four reader profiles from the Simple View of Reading and what each one needs.
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Why Linguistic Phonics Works: Structured Literacy
What linguistic phonics is, how it differs from other phonics programs, and why it is the approach we use for reading and spelling.
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Phonics and Early Reading: What Parents Need to Know
What synthetic phonics actually teaches, how it sits inside the Australian Curriculum, and what good phonics instruction looks like in class.
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Building Narrative Microstructure: Strategies
Conjunction games, retelling together and watching verb tense: how to strengthen the sentence-level skills that hold a child's story together.
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Narrative Microstructure: Blocks of Storytelling
Conjunctions, pronouns that refer back clearly, consistent tense and words like 'then': the sentence-level glue that makes a child's story easy to follow.
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How Speech Sound Errors Affect Reading and Learning
A child who still says 'tat' for 'cat' may also struggle to spell it. Why speech sound errors show up in phonics, spelling and reading fluency.
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Shared Reading: Language Modelling with Books
Comment, expand, link to life: how to model language with Dear Zoo, Brown Bear, Where Is the Green Sheep? and We're Going on a Bear Hunt.
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The Power of Shared Reading for Language
What shared reading does for vocabulary, storytelling and comprehension, why the talk around the book matters most, and what to do if your child won't sit.
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Activities to Build Vocabulary Depth in Children
Sorting games, odd-one-out, narrating play and describing daily routines: everyday activities that build category, verb and describing-word knowledge.
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