Aussie Readers
Begin your at-home learning adventure
Aussie Readers is a complete English course that teaches your children to read, comprehend, spell and write.
Based on the Science of Reading Research
Proven Science of Reading
The most effective reading programs explicitly teach phonological awareness, phonics and language comprehension skills.
Course Structure
The courses are broken into 4 learning blocks, each with 10 weeks of lessons.
Curriculum Links
All lessons are linked to the Australian Curriculum. Additional documentation for home school registration in NSW and Victoria is provided.
Course Structure
The Kindergarten (also known as Foundation, Prep and Reception in states outside of NSW) and Year 1 course is provided in 4 parts (4 terms). Each part contains 10 weeks' worth of explicit instructions, lessons and activities. The final week of each term contains progress monitoring assessments and time for revision.
Children are provided with access to one week's worth of lessons at a time. When completed, they progress to the next set of lessons. Revision is built into the course, so sounds and skills are frequently revised.
Each week includes 4 explicit instructional lessons, a storybook and comprehension lesson, and suggested supporting activities to develop newly learned sounds and skills.
The Proven Science of Reading
Reading is arguably one of the most important skills we learn in our lives. We read to communicate, to learn, and to participate in our world. There has been much debate and research around the best practice for teaching reading and there is a science behind investigating which methods are most effective. I have found that teaching reading through systematic, synthetic phonics is superior to the whole language approach.
One of my favourite quotes is:
“If a child memorises ten words, the child can read only ten words, but if a child learns the sounds of 10 letters, the child will be able to read 350 three-sound words, 4320 four-sound words and 21,650 five-sound words.”
Martin Kozloff
Through my own research and training, I have found Scarborough’s Reading Rope and Gough and Tunmer’s Simple View of Reading, to be exceptional models for teaching reading. See the following articles for more information:
Their findings can be summarised in the following statement.
We read to comprehend and reading comprehension occurs when effective decoding strategies are combined with language comprehension.
I am a qualified K-6 teacher and have been teaching children since 2003. From 2015 to 2021 (inclusive), I taught Year 1 where the primary focus was teaching children to read and write. During this time, I had the opportunity to trial and explore a number of systematic, synthetic phonics programs and saw amazing results in the classes I taught.
I joined the home schooling community in 2022, and was delighted to meet such a wonderful large group of families. I saw the value in home education, and wanted to write a program that would provide quality reading instruction for home schooled children. Aussie Readers was born. This course covers all aspects of English, including oral language and communication, vocabulary, phonological awareness, print conventions, phonetic knowledge, reading fluency and comprehension, handwriting, spelling and creating written texts. The storybook component of this program allows children to understand and respond to literature.
It is my passion to see children become skilled and independent readers and learners for life. I hope you are blessed by my reading program.
Kassi Gilmour
Scarborough, H. S. (2001). Connecting early language and literacy to later reading (dis)abilities: Evidence, theory, and practice. In S. Neuman & D. Dickinson (Eds.), Handbook for research in early literacy (pp. 97–110). New York, NY: Guilford Press.
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