TWG Decoding Duo
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Speaker 2: [00:00:00] Good morning, everybody. This is Cheri Dotterer from The Writing Glitch. Today, we have two guests with us. One of them is Sarah Gannon. I keep wanting to call her Shannon.
Speaker 2: So if I do that Freudian slip, please forgive me that whole alliteration with the A N O N. So forgive me if I slip, Sarah and Melissa Orkin, and they are from Crafting Minds. Sarah has worked as a classroom teacher, reading specialist, and literacy coach for the past 18 years. She brings her knowledge of the body of research known as the science of reading to the practical application of the classroom.
Speaker 2: And Melissa Orkin, she is a developmental psychologist who specializes in learning disabilities and achievement motion. Oh, we're going to have to talk about that one. Dr. Orkin trained in the assessment of remediation of reading and learning disabilities. Welcome to the podcast, ladies. Thank [00:01:00] you. Before we begin, let us hear a word from our sponsor, Disability Labs.
Speaker 2: At Disability Labs, we are committed to impact the journey of 200, 000 teachers by 2030 so that they can reignite their passion for learning. Our professional learning series focuses on math and writing strategies to help all students in their classroom. These interventions improve students with and without disabilities.
Speaker 2: All students have access to mathematical and writing skills. We have an e book called The Pizza Problem available for 14. 95. See the details in your show notes. What is this book? It introduces the concept of squares to students. Whether you are a teacher or an occupational therapist, this math problem uses vision to develop conceptual knowledge from kindergarten through 12th grade by increasing the complexity of the student's understanding and knowledge and [00:02:00] improving their number sense.
Speaker 2: So now let's get back to the show, ladies, tell us a little bit about you. You can choose who's going first. Tell me, tell us a little more. I've read your bio, but like, how did you find one another?
Speaker 6: Sure.
Speaker 4: Melissa, do you want to start?
Speaker 6: Yeah, sure. Thank you for having us, Cheri. We're really excited to be here.
Speaker 6: Sarah and I are both educators, but we have different backgrounds. Sarah's been, as you said, a classroom teacher and a literacy specialist and a literacy coach, and my background was in reading, more as an interventionist, and then a researcher. And for a number of years, I worked at a university, Tufts University, which is just outside of Boston.
Speaker 6: And I worked in a clinic there for reading and language research, and I worked with a researcher named Marianne Wolf and Marianne was studying fluency. And so I was very involved in research related to understanding why certain students really struggle [00:03:00] with fluency and the types of interventions that can support fluent reading.
Speaker 6: And Marianne moved to a different university. She's at UCLA now. And when our clinic closed at Tufts, I thought I would continue to do clinical work, but it was around the time of all of the legislation around. Screening for dyslexia, and there was a huge surge of interest in the New England area around what dyslexia is how to screen for it.
Speaker 6: And so my work shifted from the clinical side, which is more sort of family and individual based to a school based practice. And so I started. The group crafting minds and I began to work with schools and I found Sarah and Sarah's background was such a nice compliment because I was coming from a research side, but she really knew the, heartbeat of a public school.
Speaker 6: And so we were able to bring both of our streams of knowledge together. And [00:04:00] now we offer. Resources and educational consulting to districts and individuals across the country. Fantastic.
Speaker 2: That sounds like an interesting journey. I would have liked to have done some more of that research piece.
Speaker 2: Along the way, and I did do some research along the way. I participated in a project as a research instructor, where we were looking at common core as it was really coming onto the scene, went. With occupational therapist, and we were like 5 years in to having common core as the driving force and education and occupational therapist still hadn't heard of it.
Speaker 6: Yes. Yeah, I think that you really see, I think when you're in the field. Working with individuals, you see what their daily lives are like and how many demands there [00:05:00] are on their time and how, when you're in an academic environment or when you're at the policy level, you have these ideas about how.
Speaker 6: These practices are being implemented, but when you're in the field, you see what the reality is for practitioners. And I think that's such a an important story to tell and to connect all of these sort of different domains together.
Speaker 3: I think that's the reason why I was so drawn to Melissa's work as a classroom teacher.
Speaker 3: I, she. Came to my school district, and this is before I knew her and she had just, I think, started her crafting minds and consulting practice. And it was the 1st time. And, my at that point, 16 or 17 years of having a PD provider come in to speak to me that brought in actual research and then the instructional implications and I felt almost like I'd been robbed as, going through my educational background.
Speaker 3: I went to the University of Michigan. I had a master's degree in literacy at this point. And I. I do remember sitting there listening to these words coming out of her [00:06:00] mouth, like, how had I not, how did I not know this? And I felt it was just the tip of the iceberg and unfortunately it was a two hour training and then life took over, but I think it really, it started to scratch that interest in me of what have I been missing all along and how can I learn more?
Speaker 2: It's amazing how a two hour workshop can change the trajectory of your life. It happened to me as well. So we there, I was able to connect there with Melissa with the research and you with a 2 hour workshop. So you. Met at school, but now you are co directors, move me a fast forward, like, how did that happen?
Speaker 2: Yeah,
Speaker 6: I think that as a single person who's doing support in a large field, you have limitations as to what you can accomplish. And [00:07:00] one of the sort of key components of my work is trying to provide not only. Ideas about how reading and writing, happen in the brain, but also practical resources.
Speaker 6: And so Sarah and I worked together for some time and she said, I think a number of the resources that you're showing to teachers could be stand alone. Publications that individuals could access more broadly across the country or throughout the world, if they're looking to support readers in English.
Speaker 6: And so she and I decided to embark on this sort of larger venture together of creating not only as a set of. Workshops that we can deliver in person, but also these resources, both, lessons that teachers can use for their instruction courses that they can take online through at their own pace through, self guided [00:08:00] formats.
Speaker 6: And so that's how we, that's how we decided to pursue this larger goal together as co directors.
Speaker 2: Interesting. Sarah, when you and I talked earlier, you had mentioned something about your daughter? Yeah. Am I
Speaker 5: saying that correctly? You are.
Speaker 2: You are. That's How does she fit into this whole scenario?
Speaker 3: That's sort of part of the story when again, when I when Melissa presented, I took it upon myself to come up to her afterward. And I said, I have a 4 year old daughter and I suspect something is up. And I didn't really know what I meant by something was up. But I had that. I think that mother's got that as a.
Speaker 3: Just her, the way she was producing speech, her inability to learn colors and sequence days of the week. There was just something in me that knew that this was not typical. I had two other two other children who are older than her. And so that, that kind of. Bridge that [00:09:00] again, connection to Melissa and I, and when coven happened, everybody, I think has a coven story.
Speaker 3: It seems I said to myself she's in 1st grade. Now I'm going to teach her to read. Clearly we've got all this time on our hands. I'm a reading specialist. I can do this work and I took out. My guided reading levels, I've had level C, level D, level E, and I started to, instruct her in the way that I had been trained and we put in a solid two, three weeks every day, 30, 40 minutes, I really felt like I put in the work.
Speaker 3: She was a willing participant and at the end of those few weeks, all she had done was just memorize the books that we had worked on and I could finally. Come to terms with the fact that something was up, there was something there was a disconnect between the way I was instructing her and the way she was unable to learn.
Speaker 3: And I knew she was bright. She was willing. I was a teacher who was trying. At that point, I realized, I think that there had to be something up with my instructional methods and that's. really where I went [00:10:00] on the journey of learning all about structured literacy finding an Orton Gillingham trainer, peeping in the background as she was tutored for those that whole summer and then really immersing myself in everything I could learn about the reading circuit, the way the brain learns to read about structured literacy.
Speaker 3: And That has really fueled my passion to provide teachers, just like me, competent, smart not to toot my own horn, but, just somebody who was like a really willing teacher who just did not simply have the tools. And I felt it was criminal that we were graduated from universities had the stamp that we were reading specialist.
Speaker 3: And I felt at the end of the day wow this was something that I needed to make sure that, how could I prevent other teachers from having the sense of failure, feeling like you failed children. And so that's the connection with my daughter.
Speaker 2: So the information that you received at the university was not structured literacy.
Speaker 3: It was most definitely not structured literacy. In [00:11:00] fact, at Michigan at the time, our textbooks were guiding reading and guided guiding guided reading the white book from fountains and penelic. That was my actual textbook in my reading methods course and we spent most of the semester observing reading recovery lessons.
Speaker 3: Writing notes about it, and then working on back and forth modeling of what that type of lesson would look like. And so that was the University of Michigan. Fast forward to my master's degree. There was 1 short course on phonics, but it never really connected the importance of how to be explicit, how to be systematic, how to be cumulative.
Speaker 3: I think I heard those words, but it was never. It was never shown in practice, and again, that's what I think Crafting Minds aims to do. It takes the research that we, that, the Nadine Gobs and these amazing Mary Ann Wolfe people of the world, and bridge it, connect it to the practical application in the classroom.
Speaker 2: Could you give me an example of that?
Speaker 3: Of how [00:12:00] we do it. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's what Melissa was speaking to a bit earlier. Yeah.
Speaker 6: Yeah. So one thing, one thing that we know about fluency is, and this is something we're going to be talking about. We've talked about in some different publications, but we're going to be talking about it more at some upcoming conferences is that fluency is not just the result of repetition and practice, which is often the most common.
Speaker 6: Approach to building fluency like repeated reading, that or modeling, listen to how I read this story. You see how it sounds like language. Now you try and read it that way. Fluency from, the research on in cognitive neuroscience and in behavioral studies as well has shown that it's a coordination of multiple aspects of word knowledge. So when fluent readers read, they're activating different parts of the brain that are not only responsible for word recognition, but are also responsible for retrieving the meaning of the word and retrieving the part of [00:13:00] speech or processing morphology and thinking about the context.
Speaker 6: So we're, it's a multi competential approach and that's really what appealed to us as well about structured literacy. Structured literacy is the idea that you're not only building word reading skills, you're also building knowledge of semantics, word meaning, syntax, parts of speech, morphology, spelling and comprehension.
Speaker 6: And you're trying to do it in a cohesive way. And when we started working with educators and developing these resources, our lessons, even though they are designed for students who might be flagged as a striving reader, because they're struggling with word recognition and automaticity. The instruction goes beyond just phonics.
Speaker 6: It integrates these other aspects of word knowledge. So that's a way in which we're trying to make this kind [00:14:00] of bridge between what the research says about how fluency happens in the brain and what educators can do to actually bring those strategies into their intervention work or their classroom work.
Speaker 6: for explaining
Speaker 2: that. That was probably the clearest. Understanding and connection to the older guided reading versus to how the fluency that I've heard to this point, and that's not my background. I'm not a reading specialist. I work with writing skills and. I've really been trying to figure out that connection without having to go back to school and you get little bits and pieces.
Speaker 2: And that's why I wanted to do this podcast is I wanted. [00:15:00] And people that do understand a little bit more about writing to make that connection with reading and vice versa, people that understand with reading, make that connection with writing because it's not an innate skill to go from one to the other.
Speaker 2: There is that whole systematic. Explicit, cumulative, multi sensory connection that you really do need to be explicitly taught. One thing I'm seeing with a lot of handwriting programs is they stop at letter formation and then they don't bridge the gap. It's like what you were reflecting with the Fontas and Penis, is that, did I say them right?
Speaker 2: Fontas and Penel. Penel. Fontas and Penel. Fontas and Penel. They had this guided reading. They did part of it. But there was this gap to make [00:16:00] that connection over here. And I see a lot of the programs having this gap. How have you in your program helped bridge that cumulative gap between understanding how to learn how to write and letter formation to bridge it into and make those connections with reading skills?
Speaker 6: So the way that so we have a series of intervention resources. Much of both of our work was done with what we would call striving reader. So students who are below benchmark who are probably receiving that double dose of instruction in the classroom. So they're not only getting the, general classroom instruction that all the students are receiving, but then they're also maybe being pulled over to the teacher table to do some small group work with the teacher, or there may be being, supported by the reading specialist. Perhaps they have also been identified as having, a reading disability and [00:17:00] we really wanted to focus on those students. And so we developed a series of interventions that were designed to accompany.
Speaker 6: Decodable text because, as you said, there seemed to be these two camps. One was we're going to do word work and we're going to work on phonics skills and we're going to really drive home those skills primarily through like single word activities. So whether it's reading individual words or playing games with individual words.
Speaker 6: And it seemed to lack the opportunity to apply those skills to stories. And then there was the other camp, the guided reading camp, Fontas and Pinnell others, Lucy Goggins. Yeah, thank you. Who were really story based. And they said, we're going to support students by having them practice stories, but it's, The phonics instruction is going to be more kind of incidental.
Speaker 6: There's not going to be like a scope and sequence where we're building skills. It's just whatever words come up in the text. And so we thought, why can't we do something that kind of combines both? That [00:18:00] has a systematic sequential approach to it of building phonics skills, because we know that we want to build skills in an order that gives kids the biggest bang for their buck.
Speaker 6: For example, when students know You know, short vowel words, closed syllable words, they know about 40 percent of words in the English language when they know short vowel and open and vowel consonant E, those magic E words, then they know about 70 percent of words in the English language. There is a system that you can follow.
Speaker 6: So why don't we follow a sequence and build skills in a sequential way, but then. ensure that in every lesson they're applying those skills to connected text. So whether that's reading a sentence or a phrase for really early readers or, actually delving into a book that's designed to be a platform for practicing those skills, because we know that's the highest leverage practice.
Speaker 6: And within those routines, we also wanted to [00:19:00] build in, as you said, writing activities. So they are You know, in these lessons, reading the words and the sentences that they're going to see in the book, and they're also writing the words and the sentences and the trick words that they're going to see in the book.
Speaker 6: So there's a high level of alignment between what they're reading and what they're writing so that they have that opportunity to practice and and we. In our trainings provide some support for teachers about how to teach spelling in a really explicit and systematic way. That goes beyond, as you said, just letter formation, but follows more of almost like an Orton Gillingham approach where students are taught to break up the word into sounds before they begin writing it, or they're taught to break up a multi syllable word into syllables before they start writing out each syllable so that they're strategic in their approach [00:20:00] and that they have it integrates the phonemic piece with the letter production because writing is just really, it's really complex.
Speaker 6: You know better than I. It's integrating their knowledge of phonology. It's integrating their processing, so their ability to form the letters, their knowledge of phonics, their working memory. All of these different pieces are being tapped when they're spelling words. And so having a strategic approach that is reinforced through instruction over and over again is so beneficial for students in the long run.
Speaker 3: Melissa, I think you, you reminded me when I'm thinking about our dictation routine, not only are they practicing words that they're reading, right? So the concept of the phonics concept that you mentioned, but the dictation is. Is set up so that students are practicing incrementally different pieces.
Speaker 3: At the beginning, they might start with the letter sounds or something called the rhyme pattern. The vowel [00:21:00] after the part of the word with the vowel. But act, they might practice the at rhyme pattern and then they. Might write the single word, the whole word bat, and then they might write the phrase or the sentence.
Speaker 3: So what we're trying to do also is build that capacity for students so that they can become more automatic in the writing, which then allows teachers to also instruct in the handwriting letter formation piece there as well.
Speaker 2: And I think it also bridges over to the gap of how to help the occupational therapist know what to bring into their treatment to build on those gaps between What they're understanding and what they're not.
Speaker 2: And I think that will help build those visual perceptual skills. If they're seeing the same thing, maybe in a different form, maybe doing it a little bit differently because, occupational therapists never have kids sit. They're always doing something other than sitting and [00:22:00] writing. Granted, yes, they do, but they're doing ball activities.
Speaker 2: So they're bringing the ball back and forth with the students, B A T, so they're practicing spelling orally while they're doing an activity on their balance. If this The collaboration with the teacher and the occupational therapist is efficient. They can utilize those words that are being used in the classroom effectively.
Speaker 2: Yes.
Speaker 6: I love that idea, Cheri, and I think that you're so right. I think that sometimes we in schools work in silos and yet our instructional time is so precious. And especially for, we're talking about students who are like six, seven, eight, nine, a school day for them feels like a year, so for them to move from one setting to another and to be working on totally different skills, it's hard for them to be the ones to integrate all of this knowledge [00:23:00] and apply it.
Speaker 6: So if the teachers are able to integrate it For them through their instruction by, as you said, pulling the concepts that are being worked on in the classroom or in small group intervention into the specialized services that the occupational therapist, or even we talk about language teachers, for students who are multilingual and they're working on language skills.
Speaker 6: They could be working on the words that the students learning for their reading or their writing instruction as well. That's so amazing. It's such a gift to the student to be able to give them That connection,
Speaker 2: and I firmly believe that collaborative instruction is the thing that is missing in some of the, in the silos.
Speaker 2: . That are out there. If they could build that collaboration a little bit more, it would definitely benefit, like you said, benefit the students. And I, that's part of the reason why the writing Glitch [00:24:00] exists. Is to have this awareness of, Oh, I never even thought about going to the teacher and asking them what words are coming up this year in your books.
Speaker 2: Do you have word lists that they're working on? Not necessarily spelling list, but that's the best way I can describe that. In an audio version do you have a spelling list or word list with each section? There's no reason that the occupational therapist can't have that word list and build sentences from that.
Speaker 2: Now, one of the areas that you mentioned earlier was dictation. And a lot of occupational therapists don't realize that copying and then the next layer is dictation. And then there's a final layer and that self generation of sentences, occupational [00:25:00] therapists don't know that exists. So that's also one of the pieces I like to bring in to the podcast that.
Speaker 2: And make that awareness so the teachers are aware occupational therapists don't know that degree. Yes.
Speaker 6: Yeah. And I think that we have comprehension questions in our so even though the books are decodable, there still are, obviously the goal always a reading instruction is to make meaning out of what you're reading.
Speaker 6: And so we have comprehension questions and those are great as writing prompts. For students, rather than just answering the question orally, they could answer it through writing. Whether it's a specialized service provider, like an occupational therapist, or the teacher, or the para, you can give the students a sentence.
Speaker 6: And have them completed or you could give them a closed passage where you know, the sentence is partially completed and the student just has to, fill in a particular word, maybe a word that they've been practicing in their dictation. So you can differentiate that [00:26:00] instruction based on the level of scaffolds or support the student needs.
Speaker 6: But that comprehension piece is a great way to actually support the generation of words through writing.
Speaker 3: I think we wanted to provide teachers with a resource and a guide because there's so much that goes into teaching a lesson. If you have 3 to 5 kids in a small group, every child, has a different need.
Speaker 3: And if teachers are expected to write less find resources, write a lesson, teach a lesson differentiate. There's so much that goes into that. And then, like we mentioned, it would be great if they consult with the special ed teacher, the occupational therapist, as teachers, some of you generally have maybe a 30 minute prep a day lunch with duties.
Speaker 3: There's really not a lot of opportunities. And so the idea was to really take the load off the teacher by providing them with. A resource that is supported by evidence and empirical research and provide them with that structure, train them in the structure, then they can spend more time working at working to [00:27:00] differentiate, just as Melissa was saying, but it's really hard to do it all and then rinse and repeat maybe 3 to 4 times a day with different groups.
Speaker 3: I just think that we're cognizant of the expectations placed on teachers. And a lot of times it's. Just it's so much and that's just reading. Now, let's talk about math. Let's talk about writing social studies. So I think that was really the impetus for creating this resource.
Speaker 2: Now you shared with me two books.
Speaker 2: I'm going to pull them up here on the screen, decoding duo and morphology anthology. You've been talking a lot about the reading fluency to me that lends itself to the morphology, but it costs all be the decoding duo. So describe these two books for the audience. I will be going into them a little bit more in next week's episode.
Speaker 2: So if you want to delve into them a little bit more than what we're going to do right here. [00:28:00] Stop back next week. But for now, tell me a little bit about Decoding Duo and Morphology Anthology.
Speaker 6: Sure. Decoding Duo is designed for students who are working at like the foundational reading level.
Speaker 6: So students who are just starting to build their knowledge of the different syllable types, as we said. And so they've been written their preplanned structured literacy routines that accompany. Some popular decodable series. So we've been very fortunate to partner with some publishers of decodable books.
Speaker 6: We've partnered with the half pint publishers, which publish book series for like really K. kindergarten first grade reading level. And then we've also partnered with DK Publishing. They have the phonics book series. And those are for first, second, third grade reading level. Of course, you might be working with a student who's not at that grade [00:29:00] level, but is reading at that grade level.
Speaker 6: And so each of the lessons is designed to provide the instruction that prepares the student to accurately and fluently read the book. The lesson has a series of 12 routines. We realize that not every teacher has the time to deliver those routines. So we've given some, recommendations in terms of the sequence they can follow over a series of days, whether they have 15 minutes or 30 minutes, or they have a full, 45 minute intervention and they systematically go through phonemic awareness activities, phonics, vocabulary.
Speaker 6: Sentence readings, sight word recognition, spelling comprehension activities that are all related to the content of the book. And so each of those manuals accompanies a different book series that we mentioned. So those are the decoding duo. [00:30:00] And do you want to talk about morphology anthology, Sarah?
Speaker 6: You're on a roll, you can. Okay, so morphology anthology. So when we developed Decoding Duo, people were, excited to have something that was pre planned. So they don't have to do any planning. What they need to do is just figure out which book series is appropriate for the students they're working with.
Speaker 6: And then they just open up the manual. And now we have digital resources available too. If teachers are looking to just. Project the lessons through slide decks. They can do that as well. But when we were developing it, folks were really excited about those K to 2 resources, but they said, we also have a need to support students with kind of these higher level skills.
Speaker 6: So students who are reading like multi syllable words, they come to a longer word and they're guessing or they don't seem to be really, reading every word that's in the text. Okay. Or we need to work on these multisyllable words, and it feels like the resources available are just too immature for those students, and they're very [00:31:00] reluctant or they feel demoralized to be picking up like a, a decodable text.
Speaker 6: So what we wanted to do is we wanted to create a series that was designed for them. So the stories in Morphology Anthology. are already built into the manual. There's, there are no separate books that need to be purchased and they're all content area topics. So the manuals for morphology anthology are thematic.
Speaker 6: So we have the Chronicles of the Cosmos, which is all about Which are stories all related to astrological events. So it's about, the Mars Rover or the phases of the moon or different constellations in the sky. We have a volume that's related to the chronicles of the deep sea. So it's about different types of phenomenon in the ocean, like blue holes and giant squid and.
Speaker 6: The names of different groups of fish. And [00:32:00] within each of those stories, we're working on a different morphology skill. Whether it's a prefix, a suffix, or a root, those are units of letters that are really helpful, not only for reading words accurately, but also for understanding the meaning of the word.
Speaker 6: And Those are also structured literacy routines, a series of 12 activities that can be delivered depending on the amount of time a teacher has, whether it's like 15, 30, 45 minutes, and it goes through, defining the root or prefix or suffix reading multi syllabic words with that prefix or suffix, doing some vocabulary.
Speaker 6: Dictation sentence reading, and then reading the actual passage and answering comprehension questions.
Speaker 2: I see a lot of ways that an occupational therapist could take what's in that book and utilize [00:33:00] it as part of their treatment, as long as they had access to that book. So occupational therapists, if your school is using this series or any other series copy of whatever the series is and have it available in the OT clinic to build.
Speaker 2: Your lessons for the week. Yes. Now, Sarah, you said me a note when you sent me those books that you have a couple other books. Is there any one in particular that you'd also like to highlight?
Speaker 3: So I, I think the decoding duo follows as Melissa was saying decodable book series. We've partnered with dandelion, we have the dandelion launchers set too.
Speaker 3: So there's eight books, 8A to 15B. And so those really fall into that one category of supporting decodable readers. I think the beauty of the morphology anthology is. that it's a standalone resource, and it in there, it seems to be lacking resources for upper grades. So these are the students who maybe have their [00:34:00] phonics skills in, single words in isolation, they can decode, but it's putting it all together.
Speaker 3: So I think having the morphology anthology resource that has really been helpful for teachers who are supporting these students in the grades three through five. And as Melissa was saying. We often hear teachers say Oh, there's, there might be prefixes and suffixes resources, but it's just single words.
Speaker 3: It's not putting it all together. And then I think the idea is also creating a resource that includes roots and that's on, on, in, in production right now. So I think the morphology anthology to me might be interesting to really highlight because it has such a broad appeal for different types of readers.
Speaker 2: Thank you. I will take a look at that one a little bit closer. Now, I glanced through the books when I first got them. I must say not having reading instruction as my background, I'm going, wow, there's a lot of information in here that I don't understand. Just this conversation and having glanced through the books ahead [00:35:00] of time has really helped me understand how the book is structured.
Speaker 2: So thank you for that. Now, before we head out. For today, is there anything else that you'd like to share Melissa and or Sarah?
Speaker 3: Again, at crafty minds, I think our whole plan is to try to think about how to give teacher resources for teachers so that they can address the immediate need of the student in front of them.
Speaker 3: I think a lot of teachers would jump at an, taking an Orton Gillingham certification, going back to school. But, we know people are busy. And so I think giving teachers resources that they can readily access led us to the development that something we have in development right now, which is our web based application.
Speaker 3: And what we are aiming to do with this is teachers can utilize any decodable text that they have access to, or if they don't have resources, they don't have a decodable text. We have a tool within this web based application that teachers can select the grade level, [00:36:00] which will help set parameters on like the sentence length, the sentence complexity, they can choose the phonics skill that they're working on.
Speaker 3: And the system then can generate a passage. Which the student will be able to read and from that passage, the system can generate the teaching lesson plan and then the accompanying slides. So it again, I think even as a seasoned structured literacy lesson planner, it takes me if I really want to do a good job.
Speaker 3: I would say at 15 to 20 minutes to plan my lesson populate my slides. And with this tool, we've really reduced it to about 2 minutes. So I think about all the time that we're going to give back teachers who can take away that part of the planning, right? We've done that piece for them. And now they can focus on the actual delivery.
Speaker 3: And that's the part that really is. You have the platform, you have what you're using, but it's the teacher, the delivery, the actual instruction that's going to make the most impact. So we're really excited about that. We're in kind of beta testing right now where teachers who have partnered [00:37:00] with us in the past are implementing it.
Speaker 3: They're utilizing it. We're getting some feedback. So we're really excited to to launch that shortly.
Speaker 6: Yeah, and I think that's a great tool too for specialists like occupational therapists who, maybe just have a couple of words, but they need sentences or they'd like a longer story or what have you.
Speaker 6: That's, a very streamlined way to generate those content without requiring a, without demanding much in terms of their planning time. Yeah,
Speaker 2: it sounds like you built in, but didn't even realize it a really good platform to create a collaborative classroom.
Speaker 6: Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2: So kudos.
Speaker 2: That is amazing. How do people find you?
Speaker 6: They can go to our website. Our website is Crafting Minds Group. It's all one word. Crafting. C R A F T I N G. Minds. M I N [00:38:00] D S. Group. G R O U P. com. And they should reach out if they have any questions or Thoughts. We'd love to hear from practitioners in the field about, what their what's worked for them, what challenges they're facing.
Speaker 6: And and if they have any questions about our materials, we're happy to connect.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and if anyone's on Instagram, the same thing cracking minds group or on Instagram, and that's a really great place to just get like real life up to date information. We post daily. We try to share resources.
Speaker 3: Again, not just our own things. We might find a resource from, a different group and share that. So if you are on Instagram, go ahead and give us a follow and we'll be there too.
Speaker 2: Perfect. Instagram is such a interesting resource. It has its good points and its bad points, doesn't it?
Speaker 3: Sure does. Yes.
Speaker 2: Thank you guys for being here today. I've learned so much. In a short [00:39:00] amount of time, your wisdom, it just amazes me as to how in depth and integrated that you have created your system. It was a pleasure having you here at The Writing Glitch. Listeners, you were put here for such a time as this.
Speaker 2: Go be awesome. Go be brilliant. Teach those struggling readers. The strategies that you learn here. Thank you, ladies. Sarah, Melissa. It was great to have you.
Speaker 6: Cheri. Thank you so much. We appreciate your time.
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