What is Orton Gillingham Tutoring?

Originally published on the Macaroni KID website

What is Orton Gillingham Tutoring?

If your child has struggles with reading or has a learning disability, you may be familiar with Orton Gillingham tutoring. The Orton Gillingham method is a structured, multi-sensory approach that helps students develop stronger reading and writing skills. It is a highly effective method that students often enjoy and that can truly revolutionize your child’s ability to read and write effectively.

The Orton Gillingham Method

The Orton Gillingham method is a research-based, multi-sensory systematic approach to helping students build their reading and writing skills. It integrates key skills including phonemic awareness, decoding, reading fluency, and reading comprehension, as detailed below.

Phonemic Awareness

Before students can learn how to read effectively, they must develop strong phonemic awareness skills. Phonemic awareness is the ability to identify and manipulate sounds in words. It involves blending sounds and syllables to form words, removing sounds from words, adding sounds to words, and rhyming, amongst other related skills.

Try some phonemic awareness activities at home! To do so, you might ask your child what word is formed when you combine the words “cup” and “cake” (cupcake), “flag” and “pole” (flagpole), and “rain” and “bow” (rainbow). Ask your child what the first sound they hear is in the words cat, mug, and sit. Then ask them for the final sounds in those and other words. For further phonemic awareness practice, you might try omitting sounds from words and asking your child what the new word would be. For example, what is the word “cat” without the /c/ sound? What is the word “leg” without the /l/ sound? Likewise, remove the last sound and ask them to tell you the new word. What is the word “bug” without the /g/ sound, scrub without the /b/ sound and “split” without the /t/ sound? Orton Gillingham tutoring can help your child build these key phonemic awareness skills.

Decoding

Learning to accurately decode words is a key component of Orton Gillingham tutoring. Students need to first learn the names of the individual letters and their corresponding sounds, then learn how to blend sounds together to form words. To teach individual letters and sounds, you can create a flash card with the letter on the front and key picture on the back. For example, you might write the letter p on the front of a card and draw a picture of a pizza on the back of the card. Then tell your child, “This is the letter p, like pizza, it makes the sound /p/.” Create a similar card for the letter a and tell your child, “This is the letter a, like apple, it makes the sound /a/.” Next, to work on writing using the Orton Gillingham method, have your child trace each letter in a tray of colored sand or salt while saying the formation out loud, like “down, up, and around” for p, or “around, up, and down” for a. When your child is ready, work on blending sounds together to form words. Start with magnetic tiles or flash cards with letters on them before moving onto word lists. Show them the letter a, for instance, and remind them that a says /a/, then put the letter t next to it and remind them that t says /t/, and finally ask them what word is formed when we put those sounds together. Move from two letter words to three letter words and so on, eventually moving onto words with blends, consonant digraphs, vowel digraphs, silent e patterns, and so on. Orton Gillingham tutoring is a useful resource for building these key decoding skills.

Learn more about the Orton Gillingham method at https://eblcoaching.com/orton-gillingham-approach/

Reading Fluency

You can help build your child’s reading fluency skills using the choral reading strategy. To do so, choose a passage at or below your child’s reading level and follow the steps below:

1. Have your child read the passage aloud to you as an initial read.

2. You read the same passage aloud to them to model good fluency.

3. Your child reads the same passage aloud with you‎, trying to keep up with your fluency.

4. Your child reads the same passage aloud one more time, and you praise them with the improvement in their fluency!

Orton Gillingham tutoring can help your child develop stronger reading fluency skills.

Reading Comprehension

Developing stronger decoding skills using the Orton Gillingham method will likely improve your child’s reading comprehension skills since they will put less effort into having to decode each word. However, you can further work on reading comprehension skills by teaching your child to identify the topic, main idea, and important details when reading. You can also ask your child questions as they read to ensure understanding, and ask them additional questions when they are done reading about why something may have happened or what conclusions they can draw from the events that happened in the story. The Orton Gillingham method can help your child further enhance their reading comprehension skills.

Reading and writing and critical components of success in school. Orton Gillingham tutoring can help your child develop these key skills and thrive in school.

Learn more about Orton Gillingham tutoring at https://eblcoaching.com/orton-gillingham-tutors-nyc/

Dear Dr. Levy, My son received an excellent report card. I can’t say enough good things about his EBL tutor. She has done a tremendous job helping him improve his reading and writing skills. Most importantly, she is wise and kind. She is always patient with him. Because of his tutor, my son writes with much more ease.

– Parent

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