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Junior Early Readers are colour coded into the following 3 categories to help you choose the appropriate level:

  • Yellow Junior Early Readers: Getting started
  • Orange Junior Early Readers: Building confidence
  • Green Junior Early Readers: Beginning to read alone 

Junior Early Reader kits

The library has Junior Early Reader kits to help beginner readers and their carers at each stage of their reading journey.

Each Junior kit offers a structured and decodable approach to learning to read with a series of sounds and letters to master before progressing.

These kits include teaching notes and a sequence of readers, allowing beginners to practice their reading from the same series through increasing levels of complexity.

Kits include:

  • Dandelion Launchers and Readers
  • Decodable Readers Australia

To search for Early Readers in the library catalogue, you can either:

  • do a quick search for 'early reader'
  • go to advanced search, scroll through 'collections' and choose 'junior early reader'.

Our library staff are available to help if you would like more information, or they can assist you with choosing books for your family. 

Yellow Early Readers: Getting started

Yellow Early Readers encourage the first steps in the explicit teaching of reading. Your young reader might be recognising some letters and their associated sounds or taking an interest in connecting pictures (story) with written text.

Yellow Early Readers:

  • work on phonics (letters and sounds) and simple sentences
  • focus on predictable patterns both in terms of sounds and sentence structure repeating
  • are often graded and sequential within a series, moving from simple sounds to more complex sounds
  • require assistance from adults

Series to try

  • Dandelion Launchers, 1 to 7
  • Decodable Readers Australia, 1 to 3
  • Fitzroy Readers, 1 to 10
  • Little Learners Love Literacy, 1 to 4
  • School of Monsters*

Orange Early Readers: Building confidence

Orange Early Readers begin to build your young reader's confidence. Continue to have your child read at their right level so that the learning is reinforced, as well as reading harder texts together to build vocabulary and comprehension.

Orange Early Readers:

  • build on previous learning and often continue to move sequentially in a series
  • include more complex stories, sentences and punctuation
  • use strategies previously learnt to decode unknown words (for example, sounding out and blending sounds)
  • need some help from adults.

Series to try

  • Dandelion Launchers, 8-plus
  • Decodable Readers Australian, 4-plus
  • Little Learners Love Literacy, 5-plus
  • Fitzroy Readers, 11-plus

Green Early Readers: Beginning to read alone

Green Early Readers support newly independent readers and help bridge the gap from learning to read to reading their first chapter books. These books can still be enjoyed and read together.

Green Early Readers:

  • help increase understanding of sentence structure, story context and vocabulary
  • have longer sentences and small chapters, but may have larger font or spacing to assist
  • encourage reading for comprehension (in other words, for meaning and understanding) rather than 'learning' to read
  • are simple chapter books that act as bridging texts to the Junior Fiction collection.

Series to try

  • Aussie Kids*
  • Besties*
  • Billie B Brown* and Hey Jack*
  • Little Ash*
  • Meet Ella

* Titles marked with an asterisk are available as eBooks through the Overdrive app – find out how to borrow and read eBooks on our eBooks and audiobooks page.

More information