A Very Big Country reading package covers the topic of basic Australian geography: major land forms, climatic zones and states, territories and capital cities.

It is suitable for use with adult immigrants who want to know something about the geography of their new country and for native-born Australians who have difficulty in accessing information of this type because of problems with literacy. It can also be used in primary and secondary schools to introduce topics in the SOSE area.

The reading texts are written at three successive levels of difficulty within the one volume to allow flexibility to teachers of multi-level classes and to encourage hesitant readers to progress from their decoding, vocabulary and sentence structure comfort zones to a slightly higher level with the aid of the scaffolding provided by similarity of content and identical illustrations at each level. We use the terms Easy, Medium and Hard, rather than the more conventional professional terms to distinguish the three levels because students know these simple words and are not distracted from the text trying to work out the meanings of more difficult terms.