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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!
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…
An Orton-Gillingham refresher course is for someone who has already completed a training course at Orton Gillingham. A refresher course reviews key principles and areas that may be trickier to teach. A refresher training may also help you plan instruction for your current students’ needs. It also provides you with the most current training information…
Cloze reading passages have been a staple of schools for generations. In some form, cloze stories have been in use since the mid-20th century. A cloze passage is a reading text in which words have systematically been omitted from the story. The goal is for the student to use the context clues provided to fill…
Orton-Gillingham is not a specific program or scope and sequence. Instead, Orton-Gillingham is an approach to teaching reading and spelling. Orton-Gillingham is guided by a set of principles that support structured literacy methodology. Highly trained Orton-Gillingham teachers follow these guiding principles when teaching students. The principles ensure that Orton-Gillingham lessons are systematic and sequential, multisensory,…