Literacy Impact Educational Services

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Literacy Impact Educational Services

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Helping school leaders and systems turn literacy effort into measurable, sustainable whole-school impact.

01/11/2026

Introducing ! I worked with Dayna a few years ago and she is amazing! Highly recommend checking Explicitly out 🙌🏼

28/10/2026

25/10/2026

A student can answer every comprehension question correctly and still not understand what they’ve read.

At Bob Hawke College this weekend, I worked with teachers from the Centre for Excellence (Department of Education WA).
I opened with this sentence:

“The plifeth flaffled frebbily beside the gangoose while its hembershams watched.”

Who flaffled? How? Where? Who watched? The questions were answered correctly. Then I asked teachers to explain what was going on, and this was a different matter entirely.

Correct answers show that information has been located, not that meaning has been constructed. Comprehension questions still matter, but they don't necessarily provide the insight we need about how meaning has been constructed or not.

A question for your next leadership meeting:
When our teachers check comprehension, what do we accept as evidence that a student has understood?

Thank you to the Centre for Excellence team and every teacher for such thoughtful engagement and discussion. Such a great morning with you all.

24/10/2026

The four steps to mastery - from explicit teaching of phonics to student mastery of phonics and decoding.

Haring’s instructional hierarchy describes four stages every student moves through on the way to mastering phonics:

Acquisition: learning the code accurately through explicit teaching.
Fluency: reading and spelling it accurately and with pace, through daily practice.
Generalisation: applying it in text reading and dictation.
Adaptation: using it independently, beyond the phonics lesson.

Most classrooms do the first stage well. Far fewer get every student through all four. on 10th November we’ll look at what each stage looks like in a classroom, and why so many students stop at the first.

Knowing the stages is only the beginning. Getting every student through all four, in every classroom, every day, takes a whole-school approach: shared expectations, protected time, data that is tracked and acted on, and leaders who know what to look for. That is the work that turns good phonics lessons into effective student reading. Join me for a free 90 minute webinar- The Literacy Improvement Iceberg: why your phonics instruction isn't yet showing up for students. Limited places so secure your spot.

24/10/2026

Handwriting is a motor memory skill. Students need to recall, retrieve and form letters from memory until it becomes automatic. That frees working memory for ideas, vocabulary and sentences.

So the page should support that skill, not compete with it.

Many exercise books add extra lines, thirds and shaded bands, which gives students more to process at exactly the moment they’re trying to form letters. WRISE™ books keep it simple: a single dotted midline, across five line widths from 30mm to 10mm, matched to the skill being taught.

Less visual clutter. More focus on the letter.

Pre-orders close Friday 20 November for Term 1, 2027. Details below.

23/10/2026

The skill should decide the page, not the year level.

Orientation and formation need space, or no lines at all. Placement and sizing need a clear midline. Fluency and automaticity need a more functional scale. Students learning cursive for the first time in Year 3 or 4 may need a larger line with a dotted midline reintroduced to provide the scaffold for the initial stages of learning cursive.

I’ve mapped each WRISE™ ruling to the skill it supports. Swipe through, then ask: how does your school decide what students write on?

Pre-orders close Friday 20 November for Term 1, 2027.

22/10/2026

Address

Perth, WA

Website

http://www.literacyimpact.com.au/

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