89. The Structured Literacy Playbook with Dr. Melissa Orkin & Sarah Gannon, Crafting Minds

When I think about the presentation at the Reading League, and I think about a lot of our presentations that we talk about, fluency really is at the heart of the discussion.

But this book was written to really address students who are at risk for reading difficulties.

or who maybe need a slightly differentiated approach.

So it's thinking about students who are at risk and who would benefit from a small group for reading instruction.

And again, the emphasis really is on fluency.

And we unpack that in the book.

And I think Melissa will probably share a little bit more about that when she talks a little bit more about Marian Wolf and the opossum approach.

But at the very heart of the book, and for each of the different chapters, is having the text, the decodable text that aligns with the student's skill level and their phase of word recognition.

And that was very intentional because for a lot of students we work with and students I've worked with in my practice, It's important to understand what skill do they have? What do I need to teach them to move them into the next phase? So I maybe have students who at the very beginning level of reading, maybe know some of their letters and sounds, but they're having difficulty moving to blending.

So how can I support students in that way? And so the early chapter focuses on a winning strategy for continuous blending.

And we take that framework by creating a lesson from a decodable text.

Each chapter supports that.

And then we.

highlight the different winning strategies, which are really just high leverage instructional routines that are supported by research that helps students move through those phases of word recognition.

So it was trying to help teachers kind of not block out the noise, but I think they're surrounded with a lot of curricula.

They're surrounded with a lot of resources.

There's a lot to take in.

There's a lot to consider.

And if they were like me in my background, I didn't have the sort of skill level to know how to implement structured literacy before I received any specialized training.

I think you were talking earlier, your approach maybe was a little different, Michelle.

But for a lot of teachers, they come out of school and they don't have the bandwidth or the skills from their program to be able to take what it is that's critical to reading instruction and plan targeted small group lessons.

And so that was really the impetus for the book.

That's great.

And I love how you keep referencing fluency as this critical component that you wanted to emphasize because often in the science of reading movement, phonics is taking center stage and rightfully so.

That is an area that we've been lacking nationally.