Australian curriculum

The new Australian Curriculum is out and there is some exciting news.  The words ‘predictable texts’ and ‘combining contextual, semantic, grammatical and phonic knowledge’ are now gone.  Other worrisome phrases such as ‘visual memory’ have disappeared from the year 1 descriptors that relate to reading and writing high-frequency words.  These changes reflect the growing understanding of how we learn to read and are to be celebrated.  No longer will we have to try and counter arguments in favour o…

One of the ‘hot topics’ right now is how to grade reading when we are moving towards a more evidence informed method of assessment.   In a previous post, I wrote about how you might conduct that assessment (here) but the next natural question is, “How does this align with the Australian Curriculum from which we have to grade?”

I warn you, this post is a monster, but I wanted you to have some solid, simple information from which you could make a judgement about reading grades.

The first thing t…