A dyslexia tutor working one-on-one with a child using magnetic letters and colored highlighters, demonstrating multi-sensory reading and writing instruction.

Best Tutoring for Dyslexia: Orton Gillingham, Reading, and Writing Support for Children

What kind of tutoring is best for a child with dyslexia?

If your child has dyslexia, you may see them struggling immensely with reading. Sounding out words may be a long, arduous task for them. They might also have trouble spelling words accurately or expressing their thoughts on paper when writing. If your dyslexic child struggles with any of these skills, specialized dyslexia tutoring using the Orton Gillingham approach can help them tremendously. What kind of tutoring is best for your child with dyslexia?

Best types of tutoring for children with dyslexia

The best tutoring for students who have dyslexia is structured, research-based, multi-sensory instruction, including tutoring using the Orton Gillingham approach. Dyslexia tutoring typically includes decoding lessons, reading comprehension strategies, structured spelling support, and writing lessons. These methods can help students improve their phonemic awareness, decoding, spelling, reading fluency, reading comprehension, and writing skills.

Orton Gillingham tutoring for dyslexia

Orton Gillingham tutoring is considered to be the most ideal approach for helping students with dyslexia build their reading and spelling skills. This method is research-based, systematic, and multi-sensory, and students often enjoy receiving this type of tutoring. Your dyslexic child should typically receive an initial evaluation before the Orton Gillingham tutoring begins to gauge their specific skill levels. They may have trouble reading basic consonant-vowel-consonant words, or perhaps they have difficulty reading words containing vowel digraphs or multi-syllabic words. The Orton Gillingham method typically follows a structured approach, as follows:

Orton Gillingham lessons begin by teaching students the names of the letters and their corresponding sounds.
Lessons then advance to words containing blends, consonant digraphs, vowel digraphs, silent e patterns, r-controlled patterns, multi-syllabic word patterns, and so on.
Sessions include a review of previously taught concepts followed by the introduction of a new Orton Gillingham concept or sound.
Orton Gillingham lessons typically end with oral reading of words, sentences, and decodable stories.

These phonics tutoring lessons should be tailored to your child’s needs, integrating multi-sensory tools, such as colored sand, magnetic tiles, audio-visual flash cards, and whiteboards, to engage your child and help them retain these key concepts. The Orton Gillingham approach is recommended by the International Dyslexia Association as being one of the most effective reading methods for students with dyslexia.

Learn more about Orton Gillingham tutoring in NYC at What is Orton Gillingham Tutoring? – EBL Coaching

Reading comprehension tutoring for dyslexic students

Some students with dyslexia struggle with reading comprehension and benefit from a multi-sensory approach to tutoring. They may, for example, respond well to a tri-colored highlighting approach for building active reading and reading comprehension skills. With this method, the student is taught to look for three key elements when reading: the topic, main idea, and important details. The topic is typically one, two, or three words describing the passage and should be highlighted in blue. The main idea is what the author is saying about the topic and should be highlighted in green. Finally, the important details are salient pieces of information depicting the main idea, which should be highlighted in yellow. For this type of dyslexia tutoring, your child should learn to read the passage first, then go back and highlight the topic, main idea, and important details using the appropriate highlighters. This multi-sensory strategy can help your child build much stronger reading comprehension and active reading skills.

Read more about reading tutoring for dyslexia in NYC at Supporting Students With Reading Comprehension Issues | EBL Coaching

Writing tutoring for students with dyslexia

Many students with dyslexia struggle with writing. They may have great ideas but have difficulty expressing their thoughts on paper in an effective manner. Dyslexia tutoring can help your child improve their ability to brainstorm, write, and self-check their ideas, a key skill for success in school. They may start by learning how to construct a well-written sentence and can later learn how to expand their sentences with adjectives and adverbs. Next, in writing tutoring sessions, they should learn how to write a well-organized simple paragraph, comprised of a topic sentence, three detail sentences, and a conclusion sentence. From there, the dyslexia tutor should teach them how to expand their paragraph into an extended paragraph, with three additional supporting detail sentences added after each detail. Later, with this dyslexia tutoring, your child can learn how to brainstorm, write, and self-check five paragraph essays and longer research papers.

Learn more about effective writing tutoring for students with dyslexia in NYC at How to Help Your Child with Dyslexia Develop Stronger Writing Skills | EBL Coaching

Specialized tutoring that is individualized to your dyslexic child’s needs can help them improve their academic abilities and self-confidence. Contact us at www.eblcoaching.com to learn how we can help your dyslexic child excel with specialized dyslexia tutoring in NYC, writing tutoring in NYC, and Orton Gillingham instruction in NYC.

Frequently Asked Questions

Which tutoring method works best for dyslexia?
The most ideal method for helping students with dyslexia build their reading and spelling skills is the Orton Gillingham approach. This approach uses multi-sensory tools and structured lessons to help students with dyslexia build their core literacy skills.

What are the benefits of dyslexia tutoring?
There are many benefits of dyslexia tutoring! Some of these benefits include:

Improved decoding skills
Stronger phonemic awareness skills
Increased reading fluency and comprehension skills
Stronger spelling and writing skills
Improved self-confidence and school performance

Can tutoring improve dyslexia?
While tutoring can’t cure dyslexia, systematic one-on-one Orton Gillingham tutoring can help students with dyslexia build much stronger decoding, spelling, reading fluency, and writing skills.

Learn more about dyslexia challenges at  Dyslexia Strengths and Struggles – EBL Coaching
Read more about dyslexia at  https://dyslexiaida.org/

Dr, Levy holds her Doctorate Degree in Education and has been helping students with dyslexia through specialized reading tutoring, writing tutoring, and Orton Gillingham instruction for over twenty years.

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academic skillsdyslexiaorton gillinghamreadingwriting

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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