The Reading Coach

26/07/2025

Last night, I was gifted a ticket to Beauty and the Beast. It was wonderful and I highly recommend it to everyone - particularly as it is about difference, one of them being a love of books!

17/07/2025

I'm always up for learning more from the depth of expertise and experience Tricia Millar, creator of That Reading Thing and That Spelling Thing, has to offer. Seems she has produced a TST training video and study guide so I'm looking forward to exploring both and catching up on where her learning has taken her. My copy of the study guide is on its way from Amazon!

We've always had a dream about every middle and high school classroom being a place where anyone, teacher or student, could initiate a conversation about spelling.
Today we've launched the most affordable and useful self-guided CPD to get many steps closer to making that dream a reality.
Link in the first comment.

01/07/2025

Yesterday, I attended an excellent PD from Literacy Coordinator Stasha Demosthenous through Learning Difficulties Australia about the need for developing vocabulary in our young people and how schools can go about it.

In the session, she cited research from Louisa Moats that showed a 15,000 'word poverty' deficit in Grade 1 between students from linguistically advantaged backgrounds compared to those from linguistically disadvantaged backgrounds.

'Word Poverty' has a significant impact beyond middle school - learners haven't heard or know enough words to understand what they need to read. The gap between words they need to have heard or know and what they have heard or know increases over time. By high school there is no possibility of catching up and many disengage. I see this in high school students confronted with English Arts assignment tasks it would take them a week to comprehend let alone write to.

Thankfully, high schools like Parafield Gardens High School have identified the problem, and since 2020 have been implementing and refining a whole school evidence based response. The results confirm the worth of their efforts.

But we can't just leave the problem to schools. Two of the factors that contribute to this problem are lack of reading to children at bedtime and conversation at the dinner table. Routine and structure coupled with relationship and discussion. And for parents, a small window of time to slow down their minds and support brain health. It's a win/win for everyone.

Thank you to Stasha and LDA for the workshop.

01/07/2025

Whilst this brief animated video pertains to how pain is constructed in the brain, it brilliantly demonstrates how ALL learning is 'wired in'. When working with students who struggle with reading, the habitual pathways they have learned for reading are the wrong ones. (And for some students they will result in physical pain because of the stress of it all!)

Those of us who work with intervention have to bring the right 'steps' to struggling readers repeatedly so that newer, more useful pathways are developed. But if you notice, that first learned pathway has a slight 'bending' in its direction. This too is present with our students - it favours their use. And so we enounter some resistance, their brains don't like doing things differently and the struggling readers have usually developed shame around their lack of progress. So we have to be careful about how we nudge them in a different direction. Maybe we should show them the video?

02/04/2025

My favourite program for struggling teens gets a new look! Using it and it’s sister - That Spelling Thing - with all my older learners. One of whom recently commented, ‘gosh, working this way makes spelling so much easier’. Such is the power of the speech to print approach. 😊

That Reading Thing is a linguistic phonics reading method created just for teens and adults. You won't find a better literacy intervention for students who have struggled with reading for years.

01/04/2025

Very useful.

SPELD NSW free Adjustments InfoSheets are now available from our website! Find out more about supports and adjustments for students with literacy and numeracy difficulties.

https://www.speldnsw.org.au/information/support-and-adjustments/

12/03/2025

Through Learning Difficulties Australia, I participated in a workshop on ADHD this week with Alan Hayes ADHD coach. If anyone in Perth is needing support either for themselves or their children, I recommend you look him up.

Beyond The Haze offers ADHD coaching for teachers, families, workplaces and newly-diagnosed adults. Book a session today!

06/03/2025

Any neurodiverse young people interested in submitting their perspective?

Writing WA is proud to announce the next public all-out for our Short Story Showcase! The Showcase features the work of West Australian authors speaking…

18/01/2025

Because all experience is wired into the brain, I am integrating understanding of the mind/body connection into my literacy intervention work through different types of writing activities. Experiences of struggle, bullying, shame, fear, anger, etc. in the classroom and schools are not benign. They play out in ways that are observable and in other ways we may not be aware of.

Back pain in teenagers has emerged in the last 20 years (the structure of our backs hasn't changed in eons), alongside escalating levels of anxiety and depression.

Coping behaviours such as self harming, drinking, using drugs and food disorders develop in response to feelings we suppress.

Memory traces of traumatic childhood and adolescent experiences are powerful components of psychophysiological disorders (eg. pain, migraines, stress, depression, fatigue, dizziness, tinnitus).

Learning to feel and express our emotions cures and prevents. Writing prevents the build up of stress and internal pressure/tension. Chronic activation of the latter changes the physiology of our bodies.

This workbook contains two weeks' worth of writing prompts. The videos provided in the teen program mentioned in an earlier post support the workbook. Our struggling students are not just experiencing an inability to read and/or write. They are deeply feeling that (daily) experience. Way more than ineffective ways of reading and writing are being wired into their brains. Good intervention makes a difference. Guided journal writing addresses deeper layers of the experience and introduces a habit that is useful for life.

07/01/2025

When students experience a tough journey in learning to read and write, the brain 'wires in' all of it - the varied and possibly confusing teaching strategies, the beliefs they formed about themselves, and the emotions they repressed. All of it is filed away, which is why work with older students needs to be founded on safe and secure relationships.

Repressing feelings is not healthy. Every day, new research reveals the connections between emotional repression and ill health. If teenagers can understand the science behind the mind body system and take some simple steps to change their neural circuitry, not only will they learn more easily, they can cure their anxiety and possibly prevent illness down the track.

I am so excited to discover that one of the world's leading experts on mind/body medicine has created an educational course specifically for teenagers. I know young people's lives are changed when I work with age appropriate programs such as That Reading Thing. Imagine how much more could be healed in a young person's life if they understood how experience is wired into the brain; how everyone experiences that wiring; and that neuroplasticity allows us to change it.

I highly recommend this small investment.

https://mind-body-school-dr-s.thinkific.com/courses/Mind-BodyTeenCourse?fbclid=IwY2xjawHpzP5leHRuA2FlbQIxMAABHT8sJFVVzhCsF0pfpKlKRpKWPb4ARMY-GFYxkGwAhikPClV-7UmdPLpElQ_aem_8QEunxGM9LHuNcPAeGEgQQ

Discover the powerful link between mind and body. Manage stress, balance life, and harness the placebo effect with practical tools and insights for teens. Learn how expressive writing or journaling can provide emotional insight and release. Life balance, social stress and pain, meditation, and resil...

30/12/2024

Because of our amazing brain's learning capabilities, during childhood and adolescence, human beings form (learn) inaccurate, harmful perceptions about themselves. We don't acquire them because we truly are innately ugly, stupid, worthless, unlovable ... the only human being who isn't valuable enough to remain in the tribe. We learn them because most of us encounter at least one adverse environment in which our brains learn about threat.

Neurologically, what 'fires' together 'wires' together. When children and teenagers have adverse experiences, what gets wired together is not just the external context. The feelings they have to suppress to survive and the thoughts they create to make sense of the situation all get thrown into the mix. Sometimes, blaming ourselves for what occurs is the only experience of personal power a developing brain can salvage.

But it is not true.

Anxiety, stomach pain, nervous tics, are all natural expressions of the human mind/body system revealing the presence of emotions our brains unconsciously deem (have learned) to be 'unsafe'. Everyone learns to repress emotions and develop compensatory behaviours that craft a 'survival' persona. Perfectionism, OCD, eating disorders, drug and alcohol abuse, machismo, whatever works to keep feelings at bay and to find a public place. We all want to belong.

Anxiety and stomach disorders are the body's 'smoke alarm'. They indicate the need to explore the feelings we spend a lot of energy stuffing into the recesses of our psyche. Only that strategy doesn't work. The relationship between repressed feelings and bodily illness gains greater clarity every day. Research papers on back pain now include a discussion of the contribution of emotions. The brain expresses repressed feelings through pain - physical and emotional. Put words to the feelings and the brain no longer needs to do so.

My younger students are often bullied - and act out as a result. It's important to catch the older ones before peer driven maladaptive behaviours become established.

Writing research has demonstrated that expressive writing (time to write about deep feelings) has a positive impact on the learning progress of students with learning disabilities. Writing about deep feelings rewires the brain to not be afraid of them, allowing the flight/fight system to regulate. Neural centres related to learning can't fire if the fight/flight system is activated.

I am a psychologist working with writing, not just teaching it, but using it to support health and learning. In addition to evidence informed reading and writing instruction in my intervention sessions, with several students, we begin with 5 minutes expressive writing about feelings.

Too much gets bottled up and too many kids are alone in that repressed soup. Personal expressive writing counteracts that experience, which if left to continue can become more solidified into personality.

When the stresses in life loom large and we are overwhelmed, it is often the small memories of calm that surface in our minds and provide a glimmer of hope. Writing can be an inexpensive and effective memory that could shift the slant of our world when hope is absent. Our young people are not flawed, they are misinformed. We need to right, and write, that.

31/10/2024

Significant investment, specific purpose. I will report on utility in the coming weeks.