Orca is expanding our hi-lo offerings for middle-grade readers! Our popular, best-selling Orca Currents are now being released in the new Noah Text® edition, offering a new accessibility feature proven to assist readers with dyslexia and improve readers’ fluency.
What is Orca Noah Text®?
Orca Noah Text® editions are Orca Currents novels formatted in Noah Text®. Orca Currents are short, high-interest novels that help striving readers in grades 4–8 build confidence with real, age-appropriate stories.
What this means:
- • Same story, same vocabulary, same reading experience as the original Orca Currents.
- • Visual cues show syllables and long vowels in words to lower the decoding load.
- • Designed for striving middle-school readers who need engaging and age-appropriate support
Orca Noah Text® gives our proven Orca Currents stories a decoding scaffold, so students can read more complex text with less struggle and build skills they can transfer back to regular text. The goal is to move readers toward regular text, not to keep them in a special format.
How Does Noah Text® Work?
Noah Text® keeps standard spellings but breaks multisyllabic words into visible chunks (alternating bold and regular text) and marks long vowels (vowels that say their own names) with a visual cue.
This helps readers:
- • See sound parts inside big words.
- • Decode more accurately and quickly.
- • Free up mental energy for comprehension.
How does Orca Noah Text® connect to Orca Currents?
Orca Currents are short, high-interest novels that help striving readers in grades 4–8 build confidence with real, age-appropriate stories. This series has over 110 hi-lo favorites (high-interest, low reading level) and a long success rate.
Features of Orca Currents include:
- • Short, fast-paced novels.
- • Reading levels between grades 2.0-5.0.
- • Accessible language with compelling topics and themes.
- • Widely used for intervention, ELL and striving readers.
Orca Noah Text® builds on that existing success by supporting readers who have the background knowledge and interest to be readers but get stuck on the print. Some students can read big words in isolation but fall apart when reading long text due to the cognitive load required to decode and comprehend. Reading makes them tired, so they give up quickly; Noah Text® gives them stamina to prevent that. Some readers can be so focused on decoding that they appear to be strong readers, but they’re not comprehending at all; Noah Text® helps with that too. Learn more in the downloadable Teacher Guide, or browse the current offerings!
