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So, you’re heading to Orton-Gillingham training or just finished up. You sure know a lot about the Orton-Gillingham approach, but now what? Getting started with OG can be exciting and overwhelming. There are so many OG supplies and so much more to learn about structured literacy. Check out these Orton-Gillingham lesson-planning tips!
If you’re an Orton-Gillingham teacher, you know how rewarding this work can be. However, Orton-Gillingham lesson planning can be time-intensive. Between individualizing for students, tracking progress, and prepping multisensory materials, planning can easily eat up hours of your week. Luckily, there are practical, time-saving tips for streamlining your Orton-Gillingham lesson planning. Honestly, teachers can use…
As Orton-Gillingham tutors, it is common to find that accuracy will decline a bit in certain parts of the lesson. When we take a closer look and ask why, we notice some patterns. A frequent place for accuracy to break down is during the dictation portion of the lesson. A student who may be quite…
Why do people with dyslexia need word-level reading practice? The reasons for word-level practice go right to the heart of the challenges caused by dyslexia. When they encounter a new word, all readers go through a process of decoding that word to figure it out. However, with repeated exposure that word becomes one that is…
Before sentence dictation, we dictate sounds and individual words. During these activities, we are providing students with on-the-spot support to use their SOS strategy, and providing them with immediate corrective feedback. This can be very much a “We do it” portion of the lesson in a gradual release of responsibility model. Why do we use…
Have you been wondering why we code words? Orton-Gillingham teachers and tutors often focus on coding, both encoding and decoding, with their students. Coding is marking up words to indicate the presence of concepts or phonetic skills using paper and pencil or a dry-erase board. It can be beneficial to use color to make patterns…
As Orton Gillingham practitioners, we want to examine student errors in reading and spelling very carefully. According to the OG principles, we are charged with being prescriptive and diagnostic. This involves carefully analyzing student errors, figuring out the root cause of the error, and planning to address that area of difficulty going forward. Simply put,…
An Orton-Gillingham lesson warm-up is a brief activity at the beginning of a lesson to get the student ready for learning. It should be quick, less than 5 minutes, and targeted. This may provide additional practice in an area that they are still having difficulty with, an area that you don’t have a lot of…
So you’re hearing about Orton-Gillingham progression charts? Let’s take a closer look at what that is. Most boxed curriculum programs, whether based on Orton-Gillingham or not, have a scope and sequence. The materials and lessons are arranged in a specific order and progress according to that scope and sequence. You can look at this scope…
Decodable text is one of the most important resources for an Orton-Gillingham or structured literacy instructor. Especially for students who have relied heavily on pictures and meaning-based guessing, decodable stories are very important for breaking unhelpful habits and reinforcing their emerging decoding skills. The number of decodable options has increased quite a bit over the…