NAPLAN Worksheets by Year Level: What to Use and When

By The EduSellers Team · 2026-11-03 · NAPLAN

NAPLAN is sat in March by Australian students in Years 3, 5, 7 and 9, and it tests four things: reading, writing, conventions of language (spelling, grammar and punctuation) and numeracy. The preparation that helps is not whole practice tests on repeat; it is short, regular work on the skills each domain assesses, plus one run-through of the format a few weeks out so nothing on the day is a surprise. This guide sets out what to use for each year level and when, drawn from the 260 NAPLAN preparation resources on EduSellers (47 of them free) at the time of writing, November 2026.

What NAPLAN tests, and how it is reported

Since 2023 the tests have been held in March rather than May, and they are completed online except for Year 3 writing, which stays on paper. Results are reported against four proficiency levels — Exceeding, Strong, Developing and Needs additional support — rather than the old numbered bands. The four domains are the same at every year level; what changes is the text difficulty, the numeracy content and, in writing, the expectations for structure and control. Year 7 and Year 9 numeracy includes a calculator-allowed section; Years 3 and 5 do not.

A term-by-term timeline

• Term 4 of the year before. Nothing NAPLAN-branded. Build reading stamina with longer texts and inference questions, and keep writing routine: a timed paragraph a week, marked against a shared rubric.
• Term 1, weeks 1 to 5. Teach the strategies explicitly — read the question before the text, eliminate distractors, estimate before calculating, plan before writing — and practise them on NAPLAN-style items in short bursts, ten minutes at a time.
• Two to three weeks out. One full-format practice in test conditions, online where possible, so students know the interface, the timing and what "submit" looks like. Mark it diagnostically and reteach the two or three gaps that matter.
• The week of the test. Routines, sleep and confidence. No new content.
• After results. Use the proficiency level and the item-level report to plan intervention; that is where the data earns its keep.

Year 3

Year 3 is the first NAPLAN year, so familiarity with the format matters more here than anywhere else. The 79 Year 3 NAPLAN resources on EduSellers lean towards reading and language conventions. Year 3 Reading Test Strategies: 12-Question Practice Worksheet ($2.99) runs from foundation to challenge questions with a worked-solution answer key, which makes it a good diagnostic in week 3 or 4 of Term 1. Pair it with the free Reading Between the Lines (Inferring) lesson (AC9E3LY05), which teaches students to answer questions whose answer is implied rather than stated — the question type that trips up students who read literally. Browse all Year 3 NAPLAN resources.

Year 5

By Year 5 the numeracy items involve multi-step reasoning, so the emphasis shifts to strategy. The 120 Year 5 resources are the largest NAPLAN collection on the site. NAPLAN Numeracy Strategies: Teaching Slides ($9.99, AC9M5N08) is a slide deck with teacher notes for explicitly teaching the toolkit — estimate, partition, work backwards, eliminate distractors — and belongs in weeks 2 to 5 of Term 1, before any timed practice. Browse all Year 5 NAPLAN resources.

Year 7

Year 7 students sit NAPLAN within weeks of starting secondary school, often with teachers who have not seen their primary data, so a quick, low-stakes diagnostic in week 2 is worth more than any practice test later. The Year 7 collection is small (11 resources) and focused on language conventions. Proofreading Relay: Error to Correction Dominoes ($5.49, AC9E7LY09) is a two-to-four-player loop game that matches a sentence containing a NAPLAN-style error to its correction — editing fluency as a game rather than a worksheet. Browse all Year 7 NAPLAN resources.

Year 9

Year 9 is the last NAPLAN year and the one where writing stamina and algebra do the most work. Of the 36 Year 9 resources, two practice booklets cover the ground. The free NAPLAN Year 9 Writing: Persuasive Devices, Audience and Tone booklet (18 questions with a full answer key; AC9E9LA02, AC9E9LA08 and AC9E9LY06) has students choose devices and a tone for a specific reader and explain the effect, which is what the persuasive writing criteria reward. NAPLAN Year 9 Numeracy: Linear Relationships and Algebra ($8.99; AC9M9A02, AC9M9A03 and AC9M9A05) covers substitution, expanding, solving linear models and gradient in NAPLAN-style items. Browse all Year 9 NAPLAN resources, or the wider Year 9 collection.

Free NAPLAN resources

47 of the NAPLAN resources on EduSellers are free — download them by entering an email address on the resource page, no account needed. They are listed at free NAPLAN resources. The full collection, by year and domain, is on the NAPLAN practice tests and preparation hub.

Three things to avoid

Do not run full practice tests weekly; they consume teaching time and tell you little you did not learn from the first one. Do not teach the writing task as a formula students must reproduce; markers reward control and audience awareness, not a template. And do not let NAPLAN preparation displace the curriculum it samples — every resource above is aligned to a Version 9.0 content description because the test assesses what the curriculum already asks you to teach.