What is Orton-Gillingham?
Orton–Gillingham was the first teaching approach specifically designed to help struggling readers by explicitly teaching the connections between letters and sounds. I use the Orton-Gillingham techniques as a multi-sensory approach to teaching reading, which is a highly effective way to teach clients with dyslexia or clients who have reading difficulties. The method is highly structure, by breaking reading and spelling down into smaller skills involving letters and sounds, and then builds on the skills over time. When I work with my clients, I use sight, hearing, touch and movement while working together to connect language with letters and words.
Understanding Dyslexia
Statistics indicate that most people with reading disabilities struggle with dyslexia. Dyslexia can be understood as a language-based learning disability that impacts language and literacy skills related to writing, spelling and speaking. According to Science, dyslexic brains process information differently then non-dyslexic brains. Research shows that people with dyslexia do not utilize the back par of the brain, and instead rely on the front part of the brain. Most people use the back-left part of the brain when reading. Dyslexia runs in families, is not a disease or lack of intelligence. Many individuals with dyslexia often have talented and productive minds, with difficulties in specific areas of learning. Academic challenges relating to dyslexia include difficulties with reading, spoken language, attention, word recall, organization skills, handwriting, and comprehension. Multi-sensory instruction is the best approach to support individuals with Dyslexia. As a part of multi-sensory instruction, we link together touch (tactile), hearing (auditory), movement (kinesthetic), and sight (visual).
When to Look for a Tutor
It’s never too late for your child/adolescent to benefit from private instruction. Some children aren’t diagnosed with dyslexia until 2nd or 3rd grade because it becomes more obvious when kids need additional support in reading. Their teachers might notice that their reading is further behind their classmates. It’s important that you do not wait to see if your child will learn the necessary skills on their own. The earlier the intervention, the better off your child will be.
The Recommended Amount of Tutoring
The typical suggestion for most tutoring programs is a one-hour session, two or three times per week. Determining the length of tutoring will depend on the needs of each client. Typically, it will take anywhere from six months to three years to reach reading fluency.
We use the sand tray as an auditory drill when introducing new skills and sounds. I use “magic sand”, shaving cream, or rice to help my clients to enjoy writing. This activity involves the use of touch, sound (when verbalizing letters to their sounds), and sight. We practice blending sounds together while reading the word aloud. Multiple learning pathways in the brain are ignited by the use of the sand tray.
Air writing (also called skywriting), helps children remember letter formation in a motion-oriented memory. This is a different and separate memory than the visual memories of letters and shapes. Weak muscles in the arms can lead to bad habits in handwriting, so strengthening the arm and shoulder muscles is a benefit. We create a cognitive impression through the physical act of air-writing the letters as well as saying and spelling the words. This process implants the word into the child’s memory.
With the sandpaper letters, I teach my clients the phonetic sounds. The sandpaper letters are used to gain a muscular memory of the shape of the letters as a prelude to writing. By teaching the sounds and letters through a multi-sensory approach, the client will hear the sound, see what it looks like in the form of a letter, and feel the way it is written as they feel the letter by tracing with their fingers. It is very important that the client learns to trace the proper form of the letters to help them to develop a good pattern for handwriting.
This technique uses sight words on a piece of paper with three boxes on it, labeled “Read,” “Build,” and “Write.” Read: We place a sight word in the top box and read the word together. Build: Use letter tiles or magnets to build the word in the second box. Write: Finally, practice writing the word in the bottom box.
This is a fantastic multi-sensory way to help clients to learn spelling. Struggling spellers find this technique to be very helpful.
We also break down the syllables to slow the word down and divide it into more manageable chunks. Next, we work on phonemic awareness, by listening for the individual sounds in each syllable. Next, we think of the spelling rules (like ck after a short vowel), and we write down as many ways we can think of spelling the word. Then we use a picture dictionary (or “siri’) to find the correct spelling of the word.
When working on reading comprehension, I use story sticks to prompt different ways to look at the text from their reading. The uses of different color craft sticks help the client to understand different elements to piece apart the story. For example, an orange stick will ask the question, “Where does the story take place (setting)?” while the purple sticks ask, “What is the main character of the story?”
Kids love pulling the sticks as cues to investigate the different parts of the story needed to retell what they read and understood.
This is an activity where your child will follow along with me as I read aloud, and we take turns reading. We will interact with the text by circling short or long vowels, underlining vocabulary words we don’t recognize and need to define, we even learn how to predict the events of a story and learn that pictures can provide clues to the texts. Together we develop a greater vocabulary,
As a professional tutor, I prepare printable books that leave spaces for the clients to write in sight words, match sentences, I will guide and support while modeling the skills of proficient readers including reading with expression and fluency.
