Diphthongs and complex vowels
Your child can read words where letters team up for tricky vowel sounds — like ow in cow, ou in cloud and ew in new.
In curriculum terms
Read and spell words containing diphthongs and complex vowel patterns (ow, ou, ew, ue, ie, aw, au) and words ending in -y as a vowel sound
Ages are typical, not deadlines — follow your child’s pace. How to help at home →
How to tell they’ve got it
Tick these off as you see them — no test required.
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Try this together
Can your child read words like 'town', 'cloud', 'flew', 'claw', or 'pie' — spotting the special vowel combinations and saying the right sound for each one?
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
Where this fits in the official school curriculum — our best automated guess, not yet checked by a person.
Show candidate curriculum codes · 3 ACARA · 2 NSW · 3 VIC
Australian Curriculum v9 candidate
use short vowels, common long vowels, consonant blends and digraphs to write words, and blend these to read one- and two-syllable words
understand that a letter can represent more than one sound and that a syllable must contain a vowel sound
spell one- and two-syllable words with common letter patterns
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.