A set of the first 10 Honey Ant Readers reading books, which progressively become more complex. The Honey Ant Readers are a set of books and supporting resources to help teach Indigenous Australian learners to read. They are also a great way to bring Indigenous perspectives into any classroom.

The materials also support:

• Oral language development

• Preparation for reading

• Decoding and phonics

• Vowel-consonant awareness

• Word recognition

• Explicit awareness of grammar

• Acquisition of Standard English

The resources help educators to teach literacy within the context of Indigenous culture, building on familiar words and languages to encourage both reading and writing. They also teach reading to learners by incorporating aspects of Aboriginal English into the text, while building oral Standard Australian English through songs and rhymes.

Consultation, observation, recordings of stories and general conversational language, shaped the backbone to the underpinning theoretical framework. This informed the text for the books.

These were to be books that the community could relate to, feel drawn to, read with ease and enjoy. This is why all of the Honey Ant Reader stories and illustrations are reviewed and approved by Elders before being printed, to ensure their cultural appropriateness.

Elders, teachers, children and the community contributed and are remunerated for their work, to the project by sharing their stories, editing the illustrations, conducting final proofing of the books and trialling the completed books.

These books include features of light Aboriginal English (AE) with the text gradually and systemically moving into colloquial Standard Australian English (SAE) across the 10 books.

The resources encourage interactive learning and prepare the young beginners for reading.

The first HAR books draw attention to individual sounds by only introducing phonic words; words in which there is a one-to-one correspondence between the letter and the sound, for example d-i-g.

Consonants

The consonant sounds which are found in Central Australian Aboriginal languages are introduced into the HARs in the first stages of the series. Unfamiliar consonant sounds are introduced in later books e.g. /sh/.

Vowels

• HAR 1 to 4 contain only the SAE short vowel sounds

• HAR 5 gradually incorporates the long SAE vowels

• HAR 9 includes the SAE diphthongs