What we see with exceptional teachers is they have their kids right.

This is Susan Lambert and welcome to the first ever edition of S-O-R Essentials,

a special episode of Science of Reading the podcast from Amplify.

We are very thankful for our listeners.

You have really made this podcast both successful and interesting. And we put out a survey just to hear how you're using the podcast, what episodes

you found most helpful. And we found out that a lot of folks really use the podcast episodes as professional

learning so with that in mind we're especially designing these S-O-R essentials episodes as a tool

for you to use on your journey to learn more about the topics that are relevant to you.

These episodes will give you the essential information that you need on one critical literacy

topic. We'll be sifting through our conversations with dozens and dozens of expert researchers

to synthesize the key insights on a select topic.

We've also developed a listening guide to accompany this S-O-R Essentials episode.

This listening guide is going to distill the key information from this episode, recommend

some resources to take your learning to the next level, and share strategies for bringing

these ideas directly into

the classroom. That listening guide as well as other free high quality resources lives on our

brand new professional learning page, Amplify.com slash SOR Essentials. I'm now so excited to tell you that the topic for our first ever S-O-R

essentials episode is writing. These barriers that we have erected between certainly reading and

writing are kind of artificial and need to come down, but also between

reading, writing, and learning. A lot of educators understand the reading and writing are related,

but I think educators, we need to have really precise understanding about it.

I think kids need to write. They need to write for a variety of purposes,

...