Looking for Professional Development Opportunities?
Vowels followed by the letter r are strongly influenced in their sound by the r. It is no longer possible to pronounce a short or long vowel sound with the r. Instead, we have a vowel sound that is distorted and makes a new sound that is neither long nor short. These new sounds are…
The more students know the more complicated spelling becomes. They begin to need to take into consideration not only sound and symbol correspondence, but the word’s morphology and part of speech. One potentially confusing concept is words that end in -ous or -us. Both endings are pronounced /ǝs/. So how do we know when to…
It is important to teach the voiced sound of S fairly early in the instructional sequence. Students will need the voiced S to add the suffix -s to base words or to read vowel consonant E words with S. Because voiced S is such a prevalent part of our speech, this is a concept that…
Although the hard sound for g is more common than the soft sound, eventually the soft sound becomes necessary to learn and master. Many children may already associate the /j/ sound with the letter g due to the letter name. However, due to its greater utility, we typically teach the hard g sound first. Prerequisites…
You will find most teachers of children with dyslexia are not fans of the weekly spelling test. Words arranged by theme or covering multiple spelling patterns is a recipe for failure for many of our students. Other students may manage to learn the words for the Friday spelling test, but not be able to spell…
When you’re in the middle of Orton-Gillingham training, you learn how to write lesson plans for your students. Part of writing an effective Orton-Gillingham lesson plan is to create a word list. The words you select must be appropriate for reading and spelling. By appropriate, I mean you are choosing words that suit the needs…