Developed in partnership with Education Services Australia

The Australian Curriculum sets the goal for what all students should learn as they progress through their school life. Skills in the Foundation Year curriculum include:

• reading and understanding simple texts
• reading texts from top to bottom and left to right
• turning pages in the correct order
• identifying and interpreting pictures and titles.

It’s easy to help your child practise these skills as part of everyday life – just use these simple ideas.

Read picture books

Reading picture books together is a great way to help your child become familiar with how books work, such as which way the pages turn, and how the text is laid out. To make the most of your reading time together:

• let your child choose the book – stories and non-fiction are both great, even if you’ve read the book a hundred times already
• ask your child to look at the cover and guess what the book is about. What clues are there in the pictures and the title?
• don't just stick to the text – talk about the pictures, characters and events as well.

If your child wants to lead the reading, that's great! Don't worry if they don’t read the printed text – telling the story in their own words will build their confidence with books.

As an extension, your child might like to draw pictures of their favourite characters in the book, or act out the story with their toys.

Go online

For online reinforcement, Flutter-by-friends will give your child practice at:

• using the cover of a book to predict what a story is about
• putting storyboard pictures into a logical order to make a story
• choosing connecting words to join the sequence.

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