Orton-Gillingham

Tara is being trained in a proven and effective system that helps challenged readers become confident and proficient. You will find these key components will be part of each lesson she does with your child(ren). Orton-Gillingham is a structured literacy process that is proven to work (studies).  This is a system that works for all ages.

Each lesson consists of the following:

1. Multisensory - using tools to help learners through visual, auditory, kinaesthetic and tactile ways.
   
2. Phonetic-Alphabetic - did you know there are 108 sounds in the english language? Did you also know that there are multiple spellings of many of the sounds? (no wonder reading and spelling is so complex). As your child continues to learn strategies to decode words, they will be able to apply the rules of our language and analyze what is written for greater understanding.
3. Synthetic-Analytic - Synthetic means learning the smallest unit of sound (phoneme) and the written symbol for each (graphemes). Analytic is about breaking down a whole word into its parts, which help with decoding.
4. Structured - lessons will be taught and presented in an organized manner, that will also help with previous learning and next steps to introduce new learning concepts which will develop competent, independent learners.
5. Sequential - moving from simple concepts of our language to more complex concepts. As the student masters skills they will move on to the next steps until all steps are mastered.
6. Repetitive - this promotes word recognition, reading fluency and reading comprehension
7. Cumulative - each step is an essential building block for the next step
8. Cognitive - as the student learns and understands the rules of our language they will apply those learned skills to become a proficient reader, an accurate speller, and a creative writer.
9. Diagnostic - as the instructor, I will continuously monitor the student's progress and make changes as needed
10. Prescriptive - as the instructor, I will take the diagnostic information and plan personalized, subsequent lessons to best target and promote further learning in areas of need.

Orton-Gillingham was initially designed to help those with Dyslexia (which affects 1 in 5 people), Tara believes that all children and adults deserve to learn with this strategy/system. Currently this is not often used in our public elementary classrooms, but Tara wishes it was because she can see a massive difference in confidence in the students that she is honoured to teach. This is why she is investing so much time and money to become certified as an Orton-Gillingham facilitator/teacher.

More about multisensory learning