Our ‘DECODABLE BOOKS for Victorian State Government prep children in 2019’ petition has over 2775 signatures and over 370 comments!

With just 7 days to our Victorian state election, we are still waiting on our Education Minister, James Merlino to match the Liberal-Nationals promise of Decodable Books for all state school preps in 2019.

Dear Mr. Merlino and colleagues

Thank you for your ‘Education State’ initiative—you are delivering well-overdue change to Victoria.

Still, we urge you to include dyslexic children when making your decisions.

Your DET website page ‘Effective reading instruction’ states ‘All teachers are expected to teach phonics explicitly’.

Our Victorian prep teachers deserve training in explicit phonics instruction. Our Victorian prep teachers need a repertoire of reading instruction approaches to teach all children.

As you are well aware, “most preps are currently asked to “read” predictable books containing words with spelling patterns they have never been taught, but in fact, they are not reading, they are memorising and guessing. The most linguistically able kids can use these books to figure out sound-spelling relationships, but they set children with poor phonemic awareness up to fail”.

(Alison Clarke, B.App. Sci (Speech Pathology), MA (Applied Linguistics), Cambridge RSA CTEFLA, Member of Speech Pathology Australia, former Vice President of Learning Difficulties Australia, DVS member)

Dyslexic children need teachers trained in explicit phonics instruction via a systematic, cumulative approach (called systematic synthetic phonics) whereby phonemes (sounds) and their corresponding graphemes (letters/letter combinations) are explicitly taught and practised to mastery before progressing on. For this approach, dyslexic children need decodable books.

Please fund the following in 2019 - 

1.    An allowance for schools to purchase decodable readers for all prep children. Schools can select decodable books from this Comprehensive list of Decodable Books

2.    Teacher training for all prep teachers in evidence-based early reading instruction including how to select suitable decodable books

James, our teachers and our children deserve better.

It’s time to stop disregarding expert advice on effective early reading instruction.

It’s time to stop wasting taxpayers’ money on ineffective early reading approaches and ineffective teaching resources.

We await your response.

READ ALL ABOUT IT 

‘Decoding decodable readers’ by former secondary school teacher, Dyslexia Support Australia admin and parent of a dyslexic child, Belinda Dekker

‘Who sank the (reading) boat? A sad tale of academic misrepresentation of the role of decodable texts for beginning readers’ by Professor and Head of the La Trobe Rural Health School, Pamela Snow

What are decodable books and why are they important? by Five from Five

STAND UP FOR OUR CHILDREN TODAY

Share our petition on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, email and SMS…learn how Decodable Books help early and struggling readers by checking out our Say YES to Decodable Books in Victoria Facebook page!