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Have you ever noticed your students remembering something one day, only to forget it the next? Or, a student masters a concept in isolation but can’t apply it later? If so, it may be time to bring the interleaving strategy into your Orton-Gillingham lesson planning. Luckily, I have the full breakdown of how and when…
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…
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…
When someone says poetry, my immediate image is classical poetry forms such as sonnets. But I also have fond memories of reading Shel Silverstein poems or writing structured poetry forms like haiku when I was a child. Often, poetry is not one of the things people think of when they think of challenged readers. However,…
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…