Guidemap to Reading

About six years ago, when my school was fully involved in balanced literacy and Lucy Calkins held a God-like status in our classrooms, I could feel that something was off.  I had been teaching for well over a decade, I had my masters degree in reading, and I was a certified reading specialist….but I just couldn’t figure out what to do with the handful of students every year who just weren’t getting it. No amount of independent reading, or strategies like “use the picture to help” or “think about what word would make sense” were helping.

“There has to be a better way,” I remember thinking.

And so marked the beginning of my Science of Reading/Structured Literacy journey. As I collected and read research, pored through professional books, networked with reading researchers, and took courses, I began to realize that THIS was the answer I had been looking for all along. But it also made me angry; how could I go through that much education without actually learning to teach kids to read? I felt robbed.

Today, I am trained in Orton Gillingham and structured literacy, and that has made all the difference for my young readers. So why is this practice so effective?

It is based on decades and decades of reading research. This body of research includes findings from developmental and educational psychologists and cognitive scientists and neuroscientists, which provides converging evidence of exactly how the brain learns to read.

Structured literacy is explicit and systematic. Students learn foundational skills in an order that makes sense, and don’t have to guess what they are learning (remember having students sort words and then come up with their own rule? No more wasted time!)

Structured Literacy is also diagnostic and prescriptive, so you know exactly where a student’s gaps are and how to help them.

Structured Literacy addresses all aspects of Scarborough’s Rope. We know that reading is so much more than simply decoding words. It’s a complex process that involves nuance, syntax and semantics, vocabulary, morphology, comprehension, text structure, and so much more.  With Structured Literacy, all components of reading are explicitly taught and practiced in a cumulative manner.