Sofia's English Dojo

15 minutes a day beats 2 hours on Sunday. That is the biggest secret in East Asian schooling. Little and often, every day, like guitar practice.

Open one topic. Read the cheat code out loud (use the speaker button). Say it in your own words. Then do the three tries.

Get one wrong? Brilliant, that is data. Write it in your Mistakes Book (错题本 — cuò tí běn). Chinese students keep a notebook of only the questions they got wrong, then redo them a week later. It is the single most effective study trick in Asia.

Say it back without looking. After reading a cheat code, close your eyes and say it. If you can't, read it again. That is retrieval practice, and it beats re-reading every time.

Teach it to dad. If you can explain the cheat code to him, you own it. If he looks confused, that's on him.

The game bits: stickers hatch eggs, bosses guard belts, wrong answers come back for a rematch, and Rocky will tell you when it's squish time. Nothing is timed. Nothing is lost for a wrong answer.

Dyslexia tools are at the bottom of the screen. Change the font, make the text bigger, tint the page, switch on the reading ruler, or have the page read to you. Use whatever makes your brain happiest. Nothing here is timed.

Same six habits as the maths dojo, plus three for English:

1. Templates before creativity. Chinese composition teaching drills sentence frames and paragraph shapes (PEE, PETAL, DAFOREST, the essay skeleton) until they're automatic, and only then asks for originality. That order is exactly right for a dyslexic writer: the structure carries the load so the ideas can flow.
2. Short quotes, on cards, by theme. Three words, not three lines. Memorising quotes is the single hardest part of GCSE Literature for a dyslexic student; keeping them tiny and visual makes it possible.
3. Read aloud, write, then read backwards. Aloud for comprehension, backwards for spelling. Both are in the Black belt exam tactics.

What "good" looks like: White is Year 6 SATs SPaG and reading. Yellow to Green is KS3 analysis and writing. Blue is GCSE English Language (AQA structure, which most schools use) question by question. Black is Literature: Macbeth, the 19th-century novel, the modern text, poetry. I've quoted Shakespeare freely but not the anthology poems or modern set texts, which are still in copyright; her school's copies are the source and the method here works on any of them.

The important one: get her assessed for access arrangements early (extra time, a laptop, a reader). It changes GCSE English more than any technique. Schools need evidence of "normal way of working" over time, so the earlier she uses a laptop or extra time in class, the easier the exam-board application is.