The Science of the Sentence Team

Meg brings 25 years of Montessori experience across every developmental stage, has lectured in Australia and the USA, authored educational texts, and now combines homeschooling, tutoring, and executive function coaching to rebuild confidence in students who’ve all but given up.

Louise, a Master’s-qualified early childhood specialist with 30+ years in classrooms and universities, founded Childscope tutoring after a pivotal homeschooling experience confirmed her belief that with explicit, responsive teaching, every child can thrive.

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Learn more: The Sentence Studio

Meet Meg

Meg has worked in Montessori schools for 25 years at the infant, toddler, elementary and adolescent levels, in addition to lecturing as a teacher educator in Australia (for the Montessori Institute) and the USA (for The Centre for Guided Montessori Studies).

Meg is the author of several educational textbooks and is an accomplished speaker and presenter. She has been a homeschooling educator for the last fifteen years and also offers one-on-one tutoring in Maths and English.

Although she works with students of all ages (preschool to adult), her passion is working with adolescents who have reached the end of the line in terms of intervention, and have given up on feeling accomplished.

She focuses on building capacity and intentionally plans executive function coaching into every lesson. Meg is also the force behind the Think, Write, Read Community, an online learning space supporting teachers who want to implement a writing-first approach in their practice.

Meet Louise

Louise has a Master's degree in early childhood education, completing her research thesis, “Malaysian Parents' Perceptions of Pre-School Education” while living in Malaysia.

She has worked at the kindergarten level for over thirty years in both the public and private sectors. Louise has also worked at the university level, tutoring preservice teachers in Early Childhood literacy units at Edith Cowan University.

Her transition into specialist literacy tutoring was inspired by her work supporting a former kindergarten student who had reached Year Three unable to read.

Being responsible for this child’s homeschooling was a pivotal experience that reshaped her professional direction. It reinforced her belief that with explicit and responsive teaching, every child can make meaningful progress.

She established Childscope tutoring six years ago and offers in-person tutoring to students aged six and up. She is affectionately referred to as the ‘Queen of Games’, leveraging her considerable experience as a Kindergarten teacher to make everything feel like fun.

Our Story

Despite both living in Western Australia, Meg and Louise had no idea they were geographically so close! They were introduced to one another by a Canadian colleague. They instantly realised that they not only shared the same warped sense of humour, but also a deep love of literacy in all its forms. By the time they met, Meg and Louise’s teaching was already firmly grounded in a Structured Word Inquiry approach.

They were soon meeting weekly over Zoom to share ideas and debate thorny literacy issues. They began to realise that many of the deficits they were seeing in their students’ reading fluency, comprehension and written expression could be traced directly back to the student's poor understanding of how the words were functioning at the sentence level. A central pillar of the scientific approach that underlies the pedagogy of Structured Word Inquiry is the formulation of a hypothesis and then testing that hypothesis with a word sum. They noticed a similar process at work when examining sentence structures, and came to the conclusion that they needed an equivalent test to support hypotheses regarding a sentence’s structure.

Their solution was the BubbleMap™, the hero of The Sentence Studio! What Louise and Meg propose in The Sentence Studio turns the long-established approach to grammar instruction on its head, advocating for a paradigmatic shift in how we view and teach structure at the sentence level by placing the focus on function over form. The Sentence Studio is the final result - and Louise and Meg couldn’t be prouder!

The Sentence Studio

Get in touch

We’d love to hear from you! Whether you have questions, ideas to share, or just want to say hello, please get in touch - we’re always excited to connect and will get back to you as soon as we can.

Email

scienceofthesentence@gmail.com