Free online and video books for classroom use
With every purchase of a full set of 24 print books, your school will be given free access to both the online and video book formats of the Suzie the Scientist series for use with classroom smart boards, computers or laptops.
Both the online and video formats have full audio narration which include Suzie speech-bubble voice-overs. The online format is fully interactive allowing automated reading or manually controlled page-by-page narration.
Information for schools
The Suzie the Scientist early reader series is a unique and valuable addition to your home reader and guided reader libraries. Written by Australian educators for Australian classrooms, this early reader series not only achieves the learning outcomes of conventional early readers, but links directly to your classroom activities via multiple, explicit links to the Australian Curriculum: Science.
Home Readers
As home readers, the books overtly encourage parental involvement in the learning process by providing parents with the requisite background knowledge and additional scientific information that will facilitate a fun and engaging approach to the home reading process. Before-, during-, and after- reading strategies are also provided. Parents will therefore be fully equipped to assist student learning in two key areas of their child’s curriculum – namely English and Science.
Guided Readers:
Sets of individual books can be used for guided reading groups in the classroom. Suzie the Scientist speech bubbles throughout each book provide interesting discussion points to clarify student understanding of storylines. In addition, the four after-reading questions, based on the QAR framework, further interrogate student understanding of the storyline.
Levelled readers
The Suzie the Scientist early reader books are, first and foremost, levelled reader books. As such, they serve similar purposes of conventional home reader books in terms of:
- Promoting regular reading habits
- Encouraging fun, engagement and enjoyment in reading
- Addressing the three L’s of the Australian Curriculum: English – i.e. language, literature and literacy
However, this book series is so much more!
The unique 24 book series targets developing readers (from K–Year 2) with age appropriate text to improve literacy and reading fluency – while at the same time addressing scientific literacy!
The books span PM reading levels 1-24 (Fountas and Pinnell levels A-O) and feature an engaging “cool” scientist (Suzie), who encourages parents, teachers and kids to jointly explore and discuss scientific ideas while improving reading ability. Suzie provides relevant background information and interesting scientific facts that link directly to the learning taking place in your classrooms.
The engaging storylines have been inspired by real classroom activities of the authors as well as the ‘descriptors’ and ‘elaborations’ from the Australian Curriculum: Science. You will also note that the books align nicely with existing science education resources such as Primary Connections and C2C.
Australian Curriculum: Science
Each book in the Suzie the Scientist early reader series is explicitly linked to one or more strands of the Australian Curriculum: Science (i.e. Science Understanding, Science as a Human Endeavour and/or Science Inquiry Skills).
Each book is also written in the context of one of the four sub-strands – namely Biological Sciences, Chemical Sciences, Earth and Space Sciences, and Physical Sciences. Unlike other science-based home readers, equal emphasis is placed across all four sub-strands – six books for each sub-strand!
The relevant Australian Curriculum ‘descriptor’ statements are listed on the inside front cover of each book for each strand and sub-strand. This allows teachers to readily identify where the books align to classroom learning activities. In addition, an outline of the science concepts addressed in each book is given on the inside front cover and a description of how those concepts align to the Australian Curriculum is also provided.
The Authors
The Suzie the Scientist early reader series has been written by Australian educators for Australian classrooms. The authors have collaboratively drawn on their experiences as science educators, early childhood teachers and parents to create an interesting and diverse range of books to connect scientific concepts to everyday circumstances that children (and teachers and parents!) can relate to.
Each book topic has been intentionally chosen to capitalise on missed opportunities to use the home reading and guided reading experiences to support other areas of learning in your classrooms.
Sienna Osborne (Biography)
Randall Hall (Biography)
Richard John (Biography)
Download Book List & Summaries
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Testimonials
My guided reading group absolutely love the Millie the Mathematician and Suzie the Scientist series. They are totally engaged for the entire session and really look forward to reading. The excitement at discovering the next title we will read together is genuine and creates quite a debate. Thank you for producing such a fabulous resource!
Cyndi, Admin/Teacher Aide Mt Molloy State School
Recently we purchased Millie the Mathematician – P&C Association Special Offer and Suzie the Scientist Early Reader Series as well as received a free additional Millie the Mathematician pack. As they are such a great addition to our home reader and guided reader library, we wish to purchase three more of Suzie the Scientist and two more of Millie the Mathematician so as we would have a library containing four of each math and science packs.
Maria, Teacher, St Patricks Catholic College Primary School
I look forward to receiving the books. I heard about them from the Rotary Assistant Governor of our sector of District 9685, who handed out a flyer at our recent Presidents’ meeting. I’m pleased to hear they have had such strong Rotary support.
Mentie, Wahroonga NSW
Congratulations on a great series, our teachers love them!
Julianne, Librarian, Goondiwindi State Primary School
The teachers and students love the readers.
Felicity, Teacher/Librarian, Townsville Grammar School
I’ve just found your books online. How I wish we had these a few years ago when our little girl (and lover of all things maths and science) had been learning to read! So wonderful to hear about great work coming out of our home state of QLD.
Emma, Mum, QLD