Decoding unfamiliar words
Read Y3-4 exception words with unusual spelling-sound correspondences, applying growing knowledge of morphology and etymology to decode unfamiliar exception words
How to tell they’ve got it
Tick these off as you see them — no test required.
🖨 Print this page to keep the checklist — it prints beautifully.
Try this together
Can your child read trickier exception words — like 'ordinary', 'promise', 'recent', or 'island' — without being thrown off by the parts that don't follow the usual spelling rules?
Where this sits on the map
Stuck here? Check the skills it builds on first. Confident? Here’s what it unlocks.
solid = must come firstdashed = helps
Curriculum alignment
Candidate matches to official curriculum codes — machine-suggested, unreviewed (v0.1).
Show candidate curriculum codes · 3 ACARA · 2 NSW · 3 VIC
Australian Curriculum v9 candidate
understand how to apply knowledge of common base words, prefixes, suffixes and generalisations for adding a suffix to a base word to read and comprehend new multimorphemic words
spell one- and two-syllable words with common letter patterns
use phoneme–grapheme (sound–letter) relationships and less common letter patterns to spell words
NSW syllabus codes & stages only
Victorian Curriculum 2.0 codes & levels only
These are candidate alignments generated by semantic matching — machine-suggested and unreviewed (v0.1), not official or verified mappings. For official curriculum content see australiancurriculum.edu.au, curriculum.nsw.edu.au and f10.vcaa.vic.edu.au. Don’t rely on them for registration or compliance purposes.