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orton gillingham workbooks

OG Workbooks

OG workbooks that effectively teach reading using the Orton Gillingham methodology can be challenging to find. They must follow a structured, multi-sensory approach, while engaging the student and giving them ample opportunity for practice and repetition.

The Flags and Stars OG workbooks follow the Orton Gillingham approach for helping students develop stronger decoding and spelling skills. The program starts with phonemic awareness, a key skill area for reading success. These skills include rhyming, manipulating sounds, and identifying syllables. Using the Flags and Stars OG workbooks, students can then move onto the Flags and Stars Consonants and Short Vowels OG workbook, which teaches students the names of each letter and its corresponding sound and how to properly form each letter when writing. This OG workbook then teaches students how to blend those sounds together to form words, working in groups of five letters at a time: four consonants and one short vowel. 

Once students have mastered reading and spelling words with consonants and short vowels, they can move onto words with blends, such as flag, plug, and slip, using the Flags and Stars Blends OG workbook. With this workbook, students learn to read and spell these types of words with a multi-sensory approach.

Using the Flags and Stars OG workbooks, students can then move onto 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, and patch; words with vowel digraphs include boat, teeth, and peel; words with silent e patterns include make, bike, and time; words with multi-syllabic word patterns include cupcake, rainbow, and rabbit; words with prefixes include unable, impossible, and overcook; and words with roots include geography, aquarium, and automatic.

The Flags and Stars OG workbooks follow a multi-sensory approach, which integrates the visual, auditory, and tactile/kinesthetic modalities. With the OG 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 OG workbook that focuses on consonants and short vowels might be as follows:

When teaching sound/letter relationships using an OG workbook, the teacher 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 teacher 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 teacher and then repeat it back independently. Then the teacher 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 teacher writes the letter first in the sand while saying this language aloud. Then the student writes the letter in the sand with the teacher, and subsequently writes the letter independently in the sand. Next, the teacher 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 teacher, and finally independently in the sky. Next, using OG workbooks, the teacher might do blending exercises with the student, where the student blends sounds together to form words. For example, the teacher might use flash cards or magnetic tiles to show the letters “c”, “a”, and “t”, as long as the teacher has already taught those sound/symbol relationships using OG 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 OG workbooks can help students develop strong foundational reading skills.

Read more about the Orton Gillingham approach at The Orton Gillingham Approach - EBL Coaching

Learn more about the Flags and Stars OG workbooks at Workbook series designed to build independent study skills (eblcoaching.com)

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