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In honor of Dyslexia Awareness Month, I wanted to take a moment to draw from the comments of my readers. Whether you are a parent of a student with dyslexia, a teacher of a student with dyslexia, or a person who understands dyslexia through first-hand experience, the journey of learning is a lifelong one. As…
Have you ever had a student decide a word didn’t look right so they added an e to the end? When in doubt, they throw an e on the end. Many students learn one of the reasons for silent e as part of the standard curriculum. Most of the other uses remain a mystery. Silent…
It is easy to feel overwhelmed about how to help your child practice their reading, especially when they have dyslexia. There are a few simple tools for reading with dyslexia that can help make time spent reading with new readers more productive, less frustrating, and happier for you and your child.
By keeping your focus on promoting independence, it encourages the gradual release of responsibility. This is a developmentally appropriate way to teach. Building independence during Orton-Gillingham lessons shows children they can have a sense of ownership and control over their work. This is meaningful for kids! Another benefit of building independence is to decrease reliance…
The science of teaching reading can sound like a foreign language, especially when you are first learning about Orton-Gillingham or Structured Literacy instruction. While you will likely be talking about digraphs, trigraphs, and blends before you know it, some of the specialized vocabulary can be a bit confusing. Let’s discuss three important terms: phoneme, grapheme,…
GE or DGE? Your student knows more than they think! Whether to use -ge or -dge at the end of a word is the fourth of the short vowel spelling generalizations. Teaching the GE/DGE Spelling Generalization This spelling generalization states: Some words that follow this generalization include: Bridge fudge ledge badge lodge Bulge hinge large …
The spelling generalizations for vowels really are cumulative. Although it may take a lot of practice for your students to internalize them, an understanding of the principles at work is very important. As your students continue to learn less frequent vowel teams, they will need to draw on their knowledge about other vowel teams and…
The road you take to become a structured literacy interventionist can take many twists and turns throughout your career. Who I am today is certainly not the young, impressionable twenty-two-year-old in her first year of teaching back in 2000. If I could talk to that young teacher now, I would definitely have some advice to…
When you’re in the middle of Orton-Gillingham training, you learn how to write lesson plans for your students. Part of writing an effective Orton-Gillingham lesson plan is to create a word list. The words you select must be appropriate for reading and spelling. By appropriate, I mean you are choosing words that suit the needs…