What is ABC Reading Eggspress?

Reading Eggspress is an English skills program designed to build reading and comprehension skills for students in grades 2- 7, 7- 13 year olds. Within a highly motivating environment, students can earn a vast array of rewards as they learn and improve skills in comprehension, spelling, grammar, vocabulary and reading.

A Brief Overview of the Key Components

The Reading Eggspress Library

An online library of more than 700 e-books including illustrated chapter books, full colour nonfiction books and a range of classics. The Library includes a wide range of levelled fiction and nonfiction titles with an online reading quiz included with each title. Many of the books are e-book versions of popular Blake Education titles including Sparklers, Gigglers, Laser Beams, Go Facts, Brainwaves, Treasure Trackers, On the Job, Harmony and Health and Understanding, Wonderwits, Good Sports, SWAT, Highlights, Dangerous Games, Weird Wild and Wonderful, Storylands and many more. More than 500 of these books have detailed Teaching notes and student worksheets available to download from the Book Notes area of the Teacher Toolkit.

Teachers and students can search for titles by topic, reading level, series, author, or title. Students can: rate each book; add a book to their favourites; bookmark where they are up to; and when finished, complete the 10-question quiz. Students earn golden eggs and a trading card for each book read when they successfully complete teh quiz with a score of 80% or more.

The Comprehension Gym

The Comprehension Gym has 200 interactive lessons that appear in 10 lesson sets. The 200 lessons cover five broad levels from year 2 to year 6, with 40 lessons per year level. Each set of 10 lessons has a balance of 5 fiction and 5 nonfiction texts. The text samples cover a full range of text types including narrative, poetry, traditional tales, myths and legends, play scripts, information reports, procedures, recounts, explanations, expositions, letters, biography and everyday texts such as postcards, signs and invitations.

When students enter the Gym for the first time, they need to complete the Comprehension Gym Placement Test, which places them at the correct level within the program. Teachers can also place students at a certain level within the Manage Students area.

Comprehension Gym Lesson structure

Each comprehension Gym lesson has the same structure with 5 or 6 pre-reading activities followed by a reading passage sourced from a wide selection of fiction and nonfiction texts. The pre-reading activities build a variety of comprehension and vocabulary skills including: dictionary skills, finding the main idea, building word knowledge, drawing conclusions, understanding inference, sequencing events, character motivation, cause and effect, making connections and understanding figurative language. The lesson ends with a 16-question comprehension quiz that assess a student’s factual, inferential and textual understandings of the text.

The Stadium

The Stadium is where students can compete in real time against students from around the country and around the world. These exciting head-to-head contests test skills in one of four areas – spelling, vocabulary, usage and grammar.

The Teacher Toolkit

The Reading Eggspress Teacher Toolkit includes a massive amount of content for teachers. Highlights include:

Targeting Text
Interactive instructional study units on informational and persuasive texts.

Targeting Comprehension
Units of work for use on IWB that focus on a variety of comprehension strategies. These interactive units cover all main comprehension strategies.

Book Notes
Teaching notes and student worksheets for over 500 Library book titles.

Spelling
Student worksheets for problem areas in spelling.

Grammar
More than 70 Demonstration Lessons (Demos) for use on an Interative Whiteboard or computer. Each lesson covers one grammatical term with clear definitions and examples. All lessons also have downloadable student worksheets.