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When you’re new to Orton-Gillingham (OG) or structured literacy instruction, you might feel like you have to teach something new in every single lesson. A new phonogram. A new rule. A brand-new syllable type. However, in OG lessons, review trumps new concepts. With OG lessons, review is essential. Teaching new concepts every time isn’t necessary….
There are numerous benefits of using decodable text in our Orton Gillingham lessons. Perhaps the most important is to build a habit of using decoding skills and discourage habitual guessing. Decodable text limits the number of words where their decoding skills aren’t yet adequate. When students can use their emerging skills to successfully read the…
You may have seen the recommendation to use decodable readers or decodable text with your students, especially early on in their learning. Let’s take a closer look at what that means, why it might be beneficial, and how to go about it. Many newly trained Orton-Gillingham educators or classroom teachers ask how to use decodable…
Decodable text is written in such a way that it contains very few if any unknown concepts. It uses known syllable patterns, phonemes, and learned words. The complexity of decodable text changes as your students learn new concepts. A decodable sentence for a student working on CVC words with short a is going to look…
One thing that I find myself frequently explaining to parents, students, and other teachers is the rationale for using decodable texts. Students are accustomed to using leveled texts in their classrooms and in many school-based interventions that follow the balanced literacy model of instruction. While engaging, there are important reasons why decodable text can be…
If there is one thing Orton-Gillingham teachers can never have enough of, it is decodable text. Finding books that are highly decodable, engaging for our students and suitable for a wide variety of ages is challenging. Differences in scopes and sequences further complicate matters. However, there are some resources that I turn to again and…
I’m here to talk about finding reading passages for your Orton-Gillingham lessons or reading intervention groups. It’s one we all grapple with, am I right? We spend hours pouring through scads of Orton-Gillingham resources and books looking for decodable text, but sometimes fall short. Why does this happen? Orton-Gillingham lesson plans follow a fairly strict…