In 2004, I knew nothing about phonics, phonemes, or decoding rules. But I was asked to help a child who had completed kindergarten and an entire year of Primary 1, yet could not read a single sentence.
Using my auditor’s mindset—which is trained to question everything and look strictly at raw data—I decided on a simple experiment. I sat with him for one hour a day, opened a Peter and Jane book, and read. He echoed me, sentence by sentence.
Six months later, without a single lesson on letter sounds, he was reading well beyond a Grade 1 level.
In 2021 he graduated with a double degree from the University of Southern Australia.
