Can Orton Gillingham Workbooks Help Struggling Readers?
Does your child struggle with reading? Do they have dyslexia or a learning disability? If so, Orton Gillingham workbooks can help them drastically improve their reading skills and can serve as great tools for at-home Orton Gillingham reinforcement.
What are Orton Gillingham workbooks?
Orton Gillingham workbooks use the Orton Gillingham approach to give students extra practice with phonemic awareness, phonics, and word pattern skills. They typically follow a structured, multi-sensory approach, while engaging the student and giving them ample practice and repetition with concepts taught.
What is an example of Orton Gillingham workbooks?
The Flags and Stars Orton Gillingham workbooks follow the Orton Gillingham technique for helping students develop stronger decoding and spelling skills. The workbook program starts with phonemic awareness, a key skill area for reading success. Phonemic awareness skills include rhyming, manipulating sounds, and identifying syllables. Using these Orton Gillingham workbooks, students later learn consonant and short vowel letters and their corresponding sounds with the Flags and Stars Consonants and Short Vowels Orton Gillingham workbook. In this workbook, students learn how to properly form each letter when writing, as well as how to blend sounds together to form basic consonant-vowel-consonant words. This Orton Gillingham workbook works in groups of five letters at a time: four consonants and one short vowel.
Higher level Orton Gillingham concepts
Once students have mastered reading and spelling words with consonants and short vowels, they can move onto words with blends using the Flags and Stars Blends Orton Gillingham workbook. With this workbook, students learn to read and spell these types of words using a multi-sensory approach.
With the Flags and Stars Orton Gillingham workbooks, students then move on to learning how to read and spell words containing consonant digraphs, vowel digraphs, silent e patterns, multi-syllabic word patterns, prefixes, and roots. Words with consonant digraphs include:
- black
- song
- ship
- patch
Words with vowel digraphs include:
- boat
- teeth
- peach
- pail
Words with silent e patterns include:
- make
- bike
- time
- phone
Words with multi-syllabic word patterns include:
- cupcake
- rainbow
- rabbit
- triplet
Words with prefixes include:
- unable
- impossible
- overcook
- underneath
Words with roots include:
- geography
- aquarium
- automatic
- reject
The Flags and Stars Orton Gillingham workbooks cover these concepts and follow a multi-sensory approach, which integrates the visual, auditory, and tactile/kinesthetic modalities. With Orton Gillingham workbooks, students use tools such as colored sand, magnetic tiles, shaving cream, and whiteboards. They love this engaging, effective technique. A sample lesson from an Orton Gillingham workbook that focuses on consonants and short vowels might be as follows:
Sample Orton Gillingham Lesson
When teaching sound/letter relationships using an Orton Gillingham workbook, the Orton Gillingham tutor might hold up a flashcard with the letter “a” written on the front of it and a picture of an apple on the back. The tutor would say to the student, “This is the letter a, like apple, it makes the sound /a/.” The student would then say that language together with the tutor and then repeat it back independently. Then the Orton Gillingham tutor might take out a tray of sand and explain to the student that when we write the lower case letter a, we say aloud, “around, up, and down.” The tutor writes the letter first in the sand while saying this language aloud. Then the student writes the letter in the sand with the tutor and subsequently writes the letter independently in the sand. Next, the tutor might move onto sky writing and trace the letter in the sky, saying aloud “around, up, and down” while using gross motor muscles to write the letter a in the sky. Then the student writes the letter in the sky with the tutor, and finally independently in the sky.
Read more about the Orton Gillingham approach at The Orton Gillingham Approach – EBL Coaching
Additional Practice with Orton Gillingham Workbooks
Using Orton Gillingham workbooks, the tutor might work on blending exercises with the student, where the student blends sounds together to form words. For example, the tutor might use flash cards or magnetic tiles to show the letters “c”, “a”, and “t”, as long as the tutor has already taught those sound/symbol relationships using Orton
Gillingham workbooks and asks the student to blend those sounds together to form the word “cat.” They might do the same exercise for the letters “b”, “i”, “g” to form big, or “m”, “u”, “g” to form mug. These multi-sensory activities using Orton Gillingham workbooks can help students develop strong foundational reading skills.
Do you feel your child would benefit from Orton Gillingham tutoring? We can help them! Contact us at www.eblcoaching.com to learn more about our one-on-one tutoring programs.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are Orton Gillingham workbooks?
Orton Gillingham materials area workbooks that offer reinforcement of Orton Gillingham concepts often covered during Orton Gillingham tutoring lessons. They use a multi-sensory approach to help students develop their phonemic awareness, decoding, spelling, and reading fluency skills.
Are Orton Gillingham workbooks effective for students with dyslexia?
Yes! The Orton Gillingham approach was originally created to help students with dyslexia develop their core reading and spelling skills. However, all students who struggle with reading can benefit from Orton Gillingham workbooks and Orton Gillingham tutoring,
What skills do students learn in Flags and Stars Orton Gillingham workbooks?
With the Flags and Stars Orton Gillingham workbooks, students learn the following Orton Gillingham concepts:
- Phonemic awareness
- Consonant and short vowel letter names and sounds
- Blends
- Consonant and vowel digraphs
- Silent e patterns
- Multi-syllabic word patterns
- Prefixes
- Roots
The structured, sequential, multi-sensory approach used in Orton Gillingham tutoring sessions can help students drastically improve their reading and spelling skills.
Learn more about the Flags and Stars Orton Gillingham workbooks at Workbook series designed to build independent study skills (eblcoaching.com)
Read more about helping students with learning disabilities at www.ldonline.org.