Our Story
About RethinkLit
A teacher and an engineer, building something better for their kids, and yours.
Darcy & Kirby, RethinkLit’s founders
How it started
RethinkLit started at the kitchen table. Kirby is a primary school teacher who sees every day how children can struggle with writing, and what helps when the right support is in place. Darcy is a software engineer who believed technology could make that support easier to access, and easier for children to stick with.
They built the first version for their own children, something calm, structured, and grounded in how children actually learn, without the flashy distractions of many educational apps.
It worked. Their kids loved it. RethinkLit has since grown into six modules of tools and activities, but the heart of it is still the same: two parents who wanted something better for their kids, and decided to make it.
Read the full story →Made for the whole learning journey
One calm, focused space for children to learn on, and the same clear picture of progress for everyone supporting them.
Students
A calm place to practise letters, spelling, grammar, and writing, one step at a time.
Parents
Easy-to-read progress so you can support learning at home with confidence.
Teachers
A clear view of every learner, using the same language as home.
Our Approach
Grounded in Structured Literacy
Every child deserves to become a confident reader and writer. That happens when learning is taught explicitly and systematically. RethinkLit is built on structured literacy, an approach grounded in the Science of Reading: decades of research from psychology, linguistics, and neuroscience into how children actually learn.
Phonemes
The smallest sounds in words, such as /s/, /a/, or /t/.
Graphemes
The letters or groups of letters that represent those sounds.
Blending & Segmenting
Joining sounds to make words and breaking them apart to spell them.
Orthographic Mapping
How our brains store words for instant recognition through repeated sound–letter practice.
Every activity follows an “I Do, We Do, You Do” scaffold, gradually handing responsibility from a model to the independent writer, across all six modules.
The science
Reading and Writing Grow Together
Writing isn’t a skill bolted on after reading. The two reinforce each other: children who spell and write by hand remember letters and sounds more durably, and writing deepens the very sound–letter knowledge that makes reading automatic.
When transcription becomes automatic, working memory is freed for the ideas themselves, which is why RethinkLit builds handwriting and spelling fluency first, so composition has room to grow.
Transcription
Handwriting and spelling becoming automatic, so the child isn’t fighting the mechanics of getting words down.
Composition
Turning ideas into sentences and paragraphs once transcription no longer competes for attention.
Gradual Release
“I Do, We Do, You Do”, shifting responsibility from model to independent writer.
Sentence Expansion
Building from a simple base sentence to richer, more expressive writing.
One thing at a time
Learning to write is one of the most cognitively demanding tasks for young children, with letters, sounds, spelling, and ideas all competing for attention at once. RethinkLit breaks learning into clear, manageable steps and keeps each activity focused on a single skill, so children build confidence gradually without becoming overwhelmed.
Why it matters
When instruction aligns with how the brain learns, children don’t just memorise words, they understand how language works. Our mission is simple: to make evidence-based literacy instruction engaging and affordable for families and classrooms. We aim to make RethinkLit clear and usable for a wide range of learners, and we keep working to improve its accessibility.
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