The new Building Readers For Life Academy Membership is open!
When we talk about language or English Language Arts and dyslexia, we are most often referring to reading and writing. But truly, language encompasses more. When students learn a foreign language, reading, writing, speaking, and listening are the necessary skills. For young children developing their language skills, these are the same categories. In general, speaking…
I know so many educators who are looking for more support. They’ll often ask me for my opinion about what different memberships and PD opportunities might be best for them. The thing is, many of these teachers and tutors are at different places in their careers and looking for different things. There are a lot…
All who are trained in Orton-Gillingham have something in common and that is that we follow this specific set of principles of the approach. These principles are the interwoven thread and commonality between everyone trained in Orton-Gillingham. In a previous post, I covered What does Explicit, Systematic and Sequential Teaching Look Like?
Routines are an important part of Orton-Gillingham instruction for a number of reasons. Time is a precious commodity when working with students with dyslexia. Routines make lessons more efficient. Students know what to expect when there are well-established routines. This reduces stress and anxiety, but also requires less language when transitioning from one activity to…
The suffixing rules represent a challenging but important set of spelling generalizations. They allowed students to write a wide variety of sentences using the full range of verb tenses. Learning these suffixing rules, like the Y Rule, puts students on the path to avoiding many spelling pitfalls and being able to successfully navigate the writing…
A particularly challenging, but important, set of spelling generalizations are the suffixing rules. They are important for students to be able to write using more natural-sounding language. For example, He did hop sounds far more awkward and stilted than He hopped. Learning the suffixing rules, like the drop e rule, expands possibilities for our students…
If your partner, parent, child, sibling, or dear friend is a dedicated and hard-working structured literacy teacher or tutor, you may be searching for thoughtful and useful gifts you can surprise them with this holiday season. You need ideas for gifts for structured literacy teachers. I’m here to help – with this list of gifts that…
One category of spelling rules that is particularly important is suffixing. These rules are particularly important because suffixes are so frequently used in our written language. Writing even a simple paragraph without suffixes is an incredibly difficult task and results in the use of awkward language that doesn’t sound particularly natural. Learning a few basic…
This is the final part of our series on syllable division. The easiest and most common type of syllable division is the division between consonants. The next most common are the V/CV syllable division and VC/V, also discussed previously. The black sheep of the family was in our post on C+LE syllable division. Only one…