Dianne Murphy 📚🇳🇿🇮🇪

Here's a taste of our newly released podcast 'Inside the Reading Gap'. It's a challenging look at the stark divide between literate and illiterate outcomes in education (sound on🔉). It's also a message of hope. Listen on our website (see bio) or wherever you get your podcasts.

Bryce Dallas Howard has shared a video of the late Sam Neill singing “Blackbird” with Jeff Goldblum and Laura Dern. “Sam had an immense passion for life. Generous with his wine, his stories, his time. One of the most unassumingly attractive and magnetic people I've ever met.”

When children learn to read after years of failure, the people around them often notice major improvements in behaviour, motivation and mood. We should be doing everything we can to eliminate illiteracy.

To say I'm devastated is an absolute understatement. Sam Niel was one of the very few celebrities I looked up to. Not only was he iconic, he was genuinely an amazing human being. Rest easy Sam, we'll miss you greatly.

Twenty-two fathers spent eleven days cutting a road through a West Virginia mountain, and the woman waiting at the end of their work would spend the next thirty-one years repaying the favor. In the autumn of 1931, Alice Bowman arrived in McDowell County, West Virginia, eager to begin her first teaching job at a one-room schoolhouse tucked into a hollow beneath Spruce Mountain. She was only twenty-four years old, recently graduated, and ready to teach. But there was one problem. There was no road to the school. For generations, local children had traveled by foot along a narrow forest path, and no one had ever needed a wagon road before. Alice came from outside the hollow and needed a way to reach the school each day. When county officials explained there was no money available to build a road and suggested she simply walk the mountain trail, the families of the hollow decided that answer was not good enough. The following Sunday, after church services ended, twenty-two fathers gathered to discuss the problem. A farmer named Caleb Hensley stood and said they had asked a teacher to come educate their children, and the least they could do was make sure she could get there. He announced he would begin work on Monday and invited anyone willing to help. Every single father showed up. For eleven days they worked by hand, using shovels, pickaxes, mule teams, and generations of knowledge about the mountain they called home. They cut through rock, shaped grades, managed drainage, and slowly carved a road where none had existed before. On the twelfth day, Alice guided her wagon up the newly completed road while families lined both sides to watch her arrival. When she reached the schoolhouse, she stepped down, looked at the road, looked at the men who had built it, and for a moment could not find the words. Then she walked over to Caleb Hensley, shook his hand, and made a promise. She told him she would teach their children as long as they needed her. Most promises made in emotional moments fade with time. This one did not. Alice Bowman taught in that hollow for the next thirty-one years, traveling that same road day after day. The fathers had built a road to bring a teacher to their community, but what they truly built was an opportunity for generations of children who would pass through her classroom. And looking back on that mountain road today, you have to wonder: how many lives were changed because a group of ordinary people decided that someone else's journey mattered as much as their own?

@LizStepan @ThinkReadHQ She is! A true comrade in arms 📚

@ThinkReadHQ It is very well done! Tricia Millar is such a gem!

Did we mention our new podcast "Inside the Reading Gap" ? 👀

@ThinkReadHQ The myth that some children can’t learn to read. That it’s too late once they’re at secondary school. Sourcing the problem within the child and not looking at the instruction as the possible cause. Evidence-based content? Rigorous delivery? Enough practice opportunities?

@conorsmurf Oh good! Thank you.

@ThinkReadTweet Excellent. You'll love it .

When the world seems close to pear shaped, When leaders fill you with despair When things look dark and dreary And love seems far too rare - CUDDLE A DUCK [ It works ...]

@stoneman_claire Of course - your Dad went to Christ’s College, didn’t he?!

@ThinkReadTweet My dad was always really proud they’d gone to the same school 🇳🇿

Heartbroken to hear of the passing of Sam Neill - a true Kiwi icon 🇳🇿 A tōtara tree has fallen in the great forest of Tāne 🌳 Moe mai rā, Sam - you will be sorely missed 💔

Episode 4 of "Inside the Reading Gap" is called Hope. Reading problems are solvable, and in this episode we explain what it takes to do that, and that we can achieve far more than is usually thought possible. Thank you to @ReadEasyUK for sharing their adult learner success stories.

RIP.

Listen to teaching and literacy expert @AliceRuthBall : she has incredible insights thanks to her time working in a secondary school. On "Inside the Reading Gap" we look closely at the myths surrounding learning to read & what struggling readers really need - available on all podcast platforms.

Can all children leave state education able to read? We look at why this isn't happening, the impact it has on individuals and our wider society. Listen to "Inside the Reading Gap" wherever you get your podcasts.

In our 4-part podcast, you will hear from headteachers & principals, teachers, charity leaders, researchers & academics, literacy teaching specialists, & most importantly, young people and adults who have struggled with their reading.

Sam Neill obituary Versatile character actor who gained international star status with standout performances in Jurassic Park and The Piano theguardian.com/film/2026/jul/…

@Gwenelope Such a lovely human being. I’ve never met him but some of our friends were with him at university, and one was married to his friend. His memoir Did I Ever Tell You This? is great. He reads the audiobook.

@ThinkReadTweet I’m so sad about his passing. Great actor, good human.

@PCSnow1604 @3dancingfeet Exactly! All those children used as guinea pigs for the new ‘bright shiny things’.

Gross motor exercises to improve reading should never have made their way into the education water b/c they are not evidenced-based. That said, I thought this may have been eradicated from #ITE circles in 2026. Apparently not. Motor coordination exercises improve motor coordination. Targeted literacy support improves reading & writing. Children’s time is not ours to waste.

I’m blocked by @3dancingfeet b/c of previous efforts to set the record straight on some of her posts so cannot reply to this directly (shared with me by a PG student). It’s important that current and future teachers know that this idea is not supported by empirical evidence. It’s also unfortunately sometimes promoted by OTs. @speechwoman and I address it in @EBPRoadmap

B.B. King & Friends '87 w/ Stevie Ray Vaughan, Albert King, Paul Butterfield 🎶'The Sky is Cryin''