Reviewing and improving the series
Ready to Read and the Junior Journal provide New Zealand material for New Zealand students, reflecting their experiences and interests. Ongoing review ensures that these series are current and continue to meet the needs of students and teachers.
Recent outcomes of the review process have been:
- Texts that were available in both big book and small book format have been designated as being either for shared reading or guided reading.
- Magenta has become one level (rather than two sub-levels) with fewer texts. This change supports a relatively quick transition for students into Red, where texts provide more opportunity to develop their reading processing system.
- New levelling criteria have been developed and as a result some texts have been assigned to different colour levels (e.g., from Blue to Green) or to different sub-levels (e.g., from Blue 3 to Blue 1). A full list of the levelling changes will be sent to schools in September 2014 and are available online to download.
- A need has been identified for more texts at Red and Yellow levels that have a greater variety in sentence structure and more text per page. New texts coming out in term 4 will help meet this need.
In term 4, sixteen new guided texts mainly at the Magenta to Blue levels, and four new shared texts, will be distributed to schools.
Why level texts for years 1–3 students?
Accurate levelling establishes an appropriate gradient of difficulty. It ensures that the level of difficulty “increases gradually in such aspects as vocabulary, text length, complexity of text structure, students’ familiarity with the content, and how explicitly the content is stated” (The New Zealand Curriculum Reading and Writing Standards for years 1–8, page 9).
This presents students with continual and appropriate challenges that will advance their learning. The reading levels of texts in Ready to Read and the Junior Journal are indicated by the colour wheel, which shows instructional reading levels across the first three years at school.
