The Orton-Gillingham Approach is a structured way to teach individuals to read laid out in a sequential order. Although it is a sequential order, the instructor or teacher using the method is continuously analyzing what participants are doing during the lesson in order to determine next steps. The beautiful thing about the Orton-Gillingham Approach is that it is not a curriculum or program, it is an approach that is tailored to fit the individual learner. “The Orton-Gillingham Approach are derived from two sources: first from a body of time-tested knowledge and practice that has been validated over the past 80 years, and second from scientific evidence about how individuals learn to read and write; why a significant number have difficulty in doing so; how having dyslexia makes achieving literacy skills more difficult; and which instructional practices are best suited for teaching such individuals to read and write.”

The sequential order is based on how often a skill is used in the English language for reading or writing. The more often it is utilized, the earlier it is learned in the sequence. At The Missing Piece Tutoring, we first assess our participants to see what skills they already have before we create a starting plan. The plan is never set in stone at TMPT because we know that participants may take to a skill quickly or need more time. They may need to review a past skill. All this is done through the Orton-Gillingham Approach of monitoring participants through the lessons. A complete lesson cycle has multiple practice reading and writing utilizing a new skill, practicing old skills, while practicing fluency, writing and grammar skills.

With the Orton-Gillingham Approach, skills are taught with sound/symbol correspondence through seeing, hearing, and saying along with movement strategies and writing. At TMPT, we believe that readers as young as Kindergarten and First grade can learn these skills in multi-syllable words, as well as prefixes, suffixes, roots and bases of words. Once readers see that they can start to decode “larger” words their confidence starts to build. Patty, TMTP’s certified Orton-Gillingham tutor, had a teacher tell her that a 6th grade student that had barely spoken in class started raising her hand and volunteering to read grade level text after only a couple months of bi-weekly tutoring. While the reading was not fluent or perfect, it had built confidence in that student. Another 6th grade student shared excitedly that she had fluently read a paragraph in Science class, an achievement she had never accomplished before. The Science of Reading is really about students having the code (phonics) and being able to apply it to what they are reading (comprehending/understanding) with fluency (rate and tone). This approach wraps it all up in a tidy package, focusing on each learner’s need without locking them into a prescribed step by step program.

Want to know more about how the Orton-Gillingham is helping make changes? Read an article here on how public and private schools are implementing it and finding huge success!