• The Nugget
  • Posts
  • How Kirsty Barneveld helps kids love learning

How Kirsty Barneveld helps kids love learning

Welcome to The Nugget, a 24k gold newsletter about Castlemaine's people and events

Author

The Nugget
September 19, 2025

★ How Kirsty Barneveld helps kids love learning ★

Kirsty with Rory and Lola on her six-acre wonderland in Chewton

If your child is struggling with reading and writing, it can feel like a fresh hell. I know. I’ve been there, as have countless others.

The stats are sobering: one in five children struggle to learn to read without explicit instruction, and fewer than 20% of those behind in literacy by Grade 3 will ever catch up.

This isn’t new. Generations have left school unable to read through the methods on offer, with lifelong consequences that are deep and painful.

Despite huge advancements in understanding how the brain learns to read, changes in schools have been slow.

Earlier this year, Education Minister Ben Carroll announced that public schools must now use explicit, systematic approaches to teaching reading.

The UK made the shift back in 2006, and their Year 1 Phonics Screening Check results shot from 58% to 80%.

So, what is explicit teaching? In short: Systematic Synthetic Phonics. It’s a structured approach that benefits every learner, not just some.

Schools are now implementing this approach, but it is hard in a large classroom to treat each student as an individual learner, which is key to supporting those students who are more likely to fall through the cracks.

This hits hard for me. My partner and I have faced our own struggles with our child’s learning and confidence at school. We weren’t sure if his being behind in literacy was a learning difficulty or due to the trauma he’d experienced at school and the low self-esteem that followed.

Like so many parents, we didn’t know if the next school would be able to catch him up, or even where to begin. There is so much confusing and conflicting information out there, and at the time we had no framework to guide us.

The Castlemaine area lacks speech pathologists and literacy teachers trained in the science of reading.

Finding Kirsty Barneveld, a literacy coach based in Chewton has been a real turning point for us.

Kirsty is sunshine on a stick and it’s impossible not to feel her warmth and care when you are with her.

Her property is on six acres of beautiful Chewton bushland. When you walk into her teaching room it is bursting with games, toys and books, designed to stimulate and excite the student to reach for what interests them.

“My background in Montessori is about following children’s natural interests,” Kirsty says.

“I use those interests to scaffold the explicit teaching I’m doing. We play games, build Lego, even talk about K-pop if that’s what excites them. Their interests become my interests.”

“With older students, we might chat over a board game about their goals, and then break it down into small steps. It takes time and practice, but it works.”

For students with dyslexia, dysgraphia, dyscalculia or dyspraxia, it might take 40–50 repetitions before something sticks, but Kirsty changes the approach every time: movement-based, active-based, learning through doing, so it doesn’t get boring.

Natalie Wexler, the American education writer, says you’re more likely to read and write successfully if you understand the content.

That resonates for Kirsty and she puts it into practice in her lessons.

“A story about cricket? I’d struggle. Netball? I’d nail it, because I know the game. Real-world experiences matter,” Kirsty says.

She also stresses the Matthew Effect - that self-belief is everything. If a child sees themselves as a poor learner, it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Emotional wellbeing and literacy are deeply linked.

For Kirsty, building a trusting relationship is important.

“I tune in with my student and let them show me the direction they want to go in. When you give the student the choice and control and let go of a pre-conceived outcome, great things start to happen.”

I can confirm that it doesn’t always look like they are ‘on track’ but the work gets done and the results speak for themselves.

Kirsty genuinely enjoys spending time with her students and it shows.

Word of mouth matters when you’re a lost parent looking for help, and finding Kirsty gave us both direction and hope.

For our family, it has been the most positive experience watching our child’s literacy and self- belief improve.

Kirsty is, of course, just one option. Amy and her daughter see Louise Feiss, a Bendigo-based speech pathologist focused on literacy.

For information about assessments and support, check out:

❀ Castlemaine Secondary College on air ❀

MainFM is one of the coolest parts of this town. Anyone can join the station and learn how to present a radio show.

Students from CSC’s FLO and Vocational Major programs have recently jumped on the opportunity and created a show called CSC Hype.

Tune into MainFM on Mondays at 5:00 PM for student-led interviews, music and banter. The shows are also available on MainFM’s Mixcloud.

♡˖ EVENTS ˖♡

𖥔 TALK TO MOI PLOISE 𖥔

Hi! Kindly drop me a line at [email protected] to let me know:

  • all about your upcoming event, and

  • who I should interview next. xx