Decodable Readers Teaching Resources

Build students' early literacy skills with this comprehensive set of levelled, phonics-based decodable readers for early years students.

Designed by teachers for your primary classroom, these curriculum-aligned teaching resources have been designed to help students develop the skill they need to sound out and decode words and build students' growing knowledge of letter-sound relationships!

Each printable reader and worksheet in this collection is based on the Australian Curriculum’s content descriptions for phonic knowledge at Foundation, Year 1 and Year 2 to ensure they're classroom-ready and ready to save you time on your lesson plans!

New to teaching or using decodable readers? Read on for a primer from our teacher team!

What Are Decodable Readers?

Decodable readers are a type of educational tool you can use as part of a systematic and explicit approach to teaching reading. Typically used in the early stages of reading instruction, decodables target a specific selection of grapheme-sound correspondences (GPCs) that have been explicitly taught to students before reading, thus increasing their chances of success when decoding unfamiliar words.

The goal is to help students build confidence and fluency in their reading skills so that they can eventually transition to more challenging texts.

What Are the Benefits of Using Decodable Readers?

There are many reasons teachers are turning to this powerful tool for early years students, but here are just a few of the benefits to using decodable readers in the classroom:

1. Building Phonemic Awareness: Decodable readers are designed to teach our students the relationships between letters and sounds, which is essential for phonemic awareness.
2. Early Reading Success: With a limited set of sounds and letters, these texts have been written to make it easier for students to read. In turn, this helps kids build confidence and success in early reading, which can be a powerful motivator for children to continue developing their reading skills.
3. Systematic Instruction: Looking for a systematic approach to teaching reading? You've found it! Children are gradually introduced to new sounds and letters as they progress through decodable readers, which helps ensure that they are not overwhelmed with too much information all at once.
4. Assessment: Did we mention decodable readers can also serve as a valuable assessment tool for teachers? By observing how students read the words, teachers can get a sense of their phonemic awareness and decoding skills, as well as identify any areas that may need additional support.