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There’s so much more to phonics than simply letters and sounds. Help your students to engage in active word play, learn about the alphabetic principle, master morphology, and develop strong phonemic awareness. Check out these tips and resources all about phonics and word study!
Many children have some knowledge of consonant digraphs when they start their Orton Gillingham lesson with an Orton-Gillingham tutor, although few really are familiar with the term digraph, its definition, or all of the digraphs we teach in Level 1. Here are some tips for making digraph instruction multisensory and memorable. A digraph is…
Soon after introducing the first vowel teams, the need to discuss homophones rears its head. This can be challenging for struggling readers during Orton-Gillingham lesson plans, especially English Language Learners. What’s the difference between a homonym and a homophone? Homonyms and homophones are frequently confused and the words are used interchangeably, but there is actually…
Some of the mountains that our struggling readers must climb are bigger than others. One skill that we must introduce fairly early on, but that will take a long time to master is the vowel team syllable. Let’s look at some tips for teaching vowel teams. In principle, the vowel team syllable is easy to…
One of the very first things students need to master happens to be one of the most difficult for many of them: the short vowel sounds. Short vowels are introduced very early in level one of an Orton-Gillingham lesson plan or with any reading intervention program for that matter. While every student is different, probably the most…
When a Student Finds It Hard to Blend Sounds Together: 6 Tips for Getting Over the Hump While very often, things go along quite swimmingly in the Orton-Gillingham lesson plan, from time to time we all have a student that has particular difficulty blending sounds together. They know their letters and can correctly…
(Contains an affiliate link.) Phonological Awareness contains a mixture of foundational literacy skills which are critical for reading success. It’s hard to argue against the need to provide a strong phonological awareness curriculum, particularly in the younger grades where we can identify and remediate early to avoid later reading failure. We want to…
The ability to decode more complex text requires not only a working knowledge of the phonemes and graphemes of English and the 6 syllable types, but also an ability to divide multisyllabic words. How the words are divided affects the syllable types and pronunciation. At its most basic, syllables are units of speech. We hear…
After working with a student in Orton-Gillingham lessons for awhile, the routine can become very well known. Guess what? That’s a good thing! But… if you don’t take time to shake things up every now and then, you run the risk of having certain segments become a bit mundane. You really don’t want that to…
Not too long ago, I shared 6 of my favorite read aloud books to promote phonological awareness. I promised that there would be even more to come. Here they are! Not only are these great books for building phonemic awareness, but several of them have sequels that have similar structures and can be…