What Ten Minutes with One Student Taught Me About Reading
I still remember the first time a student read a whole sentence to me without stopping to guess. He was in Year 3, and for months he’d been sounding out words letter by letter, then freezing when the combination didn’t match anything he recognised. His mum had tried everything; flashcards, reading apps, extra time with his classroom teacher. Nothing was sticking, and worse, he’d started saying he was “just bad at reading.”
That afternoon, after weeks of structured phonics work, he read a full sentence about a dog stealing a sandwich, laughed at the joke, and looked up at me like he’d just discovered a magic trick. That moment is the reason Read Well Spell Well exists and why I offer support Australia-wide through online literacy support sessions so that every child, regardless of location, has the ability to receive specialised literacy support without families having to travel long distances for specialised help.
I didn’t start out planning to specialise in literacy intervention. Like a lot of tutors, I began by helping with homework and general primary support; a bit of maths here, some reading practice there. But the more time I spent with students who were “stuck,” the more I noticed a pattern: it was rarely about effort, and it was almost never about intelligence. It was about how reading had been taught in the first place.
Kids were being asked to guess words from pictures or context, or to memorise whole words by sight, without ever being taught the actual code, the reliable, learnable relationship between sounds and the letters that represent them. Once I understood that, I couldn’t tutor the old way again.
That’s what sent me looking for proper training, and it’s where SPELD NSW became such an important part of my own development. Completing my Sounds-Write practitioner training gave me a structured, evidence-based way to actually teach the
alphabetic code. not just drill it, but explain it, in a sequence that builds on itself lesson by lesson.
Talk 4 Writing gave me a parallel toolkit for the writing side, so that once a student could decode and spell, they had a genuine pathway into confident, structured written expression too. And ongoing work on reading fluency filled in the piece that’s easy to overlook: a child can know every sound-letter correspondence and still read haltingly if fluency is never explicitly built.
None of this was theoretical for me. I used SPELD NSW’s resources constantly while I was building my own practice, their spelling program as a framework for sequencing lessons, their assessment tools to actually work out where a student’s gap was instead of guessing, and their webinars to keep learning as the evidence base kept developing.
The Science of Reading isn’t static; new research keeps sharpening what “explicit, systematic, structured” actually means in practice, and having an organisation like SPELD NSW curating and translating that research for tutors and parents has shaped
how I run every session.
What’s stayed with me most, though, is how much the emotional side of literacy difficulty matters. Almost every student I’ve worked with arrives with some version of the story “I’m not smart enough for this.”
Parents arrive carrying their own version too; guilt that they didn’t catch it sooner, frustration that the school hasn’t been able to fix it, exhaustion from homework battles that go nowhere. Structured literacy isn’t just a technical fix; it’s a way of proving to a child, quite quickly and quite concretely, that reading is learnable. When a student who’s spent two years believing they’re “bad at
reading” suddenly decodes an unfamiliar word on their own, you can watch their whole posture change. That shift from anxious guesser to confident code-breaker, is what keeps me doing this work.
I also think a lot about the students I haven’t reached yet. Roughly one in three Australian children isn’t meeting expected literacy benchmarks by the time they sit standardised testing, and that statistic represents a lot of kids quietly falling further behind while everyone around them assumes it will sort itself out with time. It doesn’t. Not without the right kind of instruction. That’s the case for early, structured intervention, and it’s the case for organisations like SPELD NSW existing at all: to make sure evidence-based literacy support isn’t limited to families who happen to stumble onto the right tutor by luck.
Read Well Spell Well is still a small evidence-based practice, built session by session, family by family. But every one of those sessions is shaped by training and resources I wouldn’t have had without SPELD NSW’s work. If there’s one thing I’d want another tutor, or a worried parent, to take from my experience, it’s this: reading difficulty is very rarely a ceiling. It’s usually just evidence that a child hasn’t yet been taught the code in a way that makes sense to them, and that’s a genuinely fixable problem