Transcription
Hello and welcome to the Parent Teacher Bridge, where you can find the resources and solutions to help your child succeed in school. Well, you're probably here because you've been wondering, what is Orton-Gillingham? Maybe you have a child with dyslexia, or you suspect that they have dyslexia, and someone has recommended to you that you need to find some Orton-Gillingham approached programs. Well, that's what we are going to talk about today.
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I'm going to show you by the end of this video what is included in an Orton-Gillingham approach and give you some resources that you can use for your child depending on his or her needs. So, a little background on the Orton-Gillingham approach. Like so many things, it is named after people. So, first of all, Samuel T. Orton was a neuro psychiatrist and pathologist who was known for studying the different sides of the brain, the left side and the right side, which you've probably heard about based on how people learn their talents or their personality. And he realized that a child's difficulty in reading was most likely connected to the fact that their left side of the brain and their right side of the brain were not functioning together properly. Now, back then, dyslexia was called word blindness, and he worked with others in his research. One of those other people was Anna Gillingham. Anna Gillingham was a psychologist and an educator who studied the English language in depth. She knew all about the different letter sounds in the English language and how they're spelled out on paper. And Samuel Orton encouraged her to write a particular book in 1935. Take a look. It was called "The Remedial Training for Children with Specific Disability in Reading, Spelling and Penmanship." Now, it's since become known as the Orton-Gillingham Manual, and you can find this for sale online in lots of places. So, we have decades of research to support what Orton and Gillingham knew at the time, that taking a multi-sensory approach to teaching reading that would encourage the left side of the brain and the right side of the brain to work together, and teaching explicit rules of the sounds in words, translating that to syllables, and then to longer words, and then the words in the sentences. Who knew that we had so many decades of research to support that?
I'm going to share with you today several of these Orton-Gillingham characteristics. Number one, an Orton-Gillingham approach is phonics-based and multi-sensory. Phonics-based just means that you're taking the small sound parts, the phonemes, of a word and putting them together to make a real word. Multi-sensory means that as you are learning to read and you're seeing things and you're hearing things, you're going to be using your gross body movements and your fine motor skills to put all that together, and you're going to learn in a more effective way. Have you ever applied multi-sensory learning when you're helping someone study for a test? Maybe you made something into a joke and made them laugh. Maybe you actually came up with hand movements to remember something as you were studying for the test. It probably helped you remember the material better, or at least the person that you were studying with, they could rely on something that they had done with their body to remember that. You might see this in an Orton-Gillingham lesson when a child is listening to the sounds in a small word like "mat," and they may slowly move a colored cube when they hear each sound in that word. Another way that you might see the Orton-Gillingham approach used would be if a child is actually maybe standing on different areas in the classroom when they're sounding out simple words. They're actually hopping their body into different locations when they hear the different sounds represented in the word. And last of all, something else that you might see in an Orton-Gillingham lesson is air writing. So, I want you to imagine that you're spelling out a word using a sparkler on the Fourth of July. Oh, wait, you're probably just using your finger instead of a sparkler, and you're indoors when you're practicing the air writing.
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Number two, an Orton-Gillingham approach is direct and systematic. So, learning to read starts with hearing these small sounds that the letters make, putting them together in short words, eventually learning how to study the different syllables and how they work together to form longer words, maybe adding prefixes and suffixes onto the words. And there's no room for guessing. The children are taught exactly what this letter or this letter combination sounds like and when to apply it, and the material is reviewed regularly. Teaching reading in a direct way means that you are going to be able to close gaps in learning and not assume that the child will just naturally make those connections to the letters and the sounds. You might teach a small sub-skill in a very targeted way for a while. Here's a for example, let's say you're teaching the most common common suffixes that are added to words. You're going to train that child how to say each of those suffixes. Then you're going to have a period of time where you're going to practice adding the suffixes onto different base words. Let's look at this example carefully. It has three syllables all together when you pronounce it, but what was the word originally? Care. That's the base word. The suffix "ful" was added, careful. And then an additional suffix "ly" was added, carefully. A child who has been taught this analytical way of seeing the word in sections and understanding how they work together will be able to break down these longer words much easier. A student practicing with this sort of Orton-Gillingham approach might practice this suffix skill by looking at a list of words that have had added suffixes. Maybe they will go through and circle each suffix or highlight each suffix, and they're training their brain to see that difference and to break that word down.
Here's another example of a rule that you might see taught with an Orton-Gillingham approach. Think of the sound that the letter "c" makes in the following words: city, cereal, and cycle. Or the sound that the "g" makes in words like giraffe, gentle, and gem. Now, I don't know about you, but I was never taught this rule directly in a specific lesson. But the rule goes like this: if a "c" is followed by an "i," "e," or a "y," it can make the "s" sound. If a "g" is followed by an "i," "e," or "y," it can make the "j" sound. This can get really confusing for children if they don't have these rules. And at first, you might think that it is more complicated to sit and teach the children a bunch of rules, but remember, they're not learning all of them at once, and you definitely have constant review and practice in between learning these rules.
A third characteristic of using an Orton-Gillingham approach is that it teaches syllable types. Do you know the types of syllables in the English language? I certainly wasn't taught this way to read. Luckily for me, I was able to naturally make those connections in reading. The more practice that I got, but not everybody learns that way, especially dyslexic children. So, let's look at a few examples of what syllable types and learning about them can do for a dyslexic child. Syllable types and their rules explain things like, why is the "a" short in words like "cat"? It's because it's a closed syllable. The rule about closed syllables is that the vowels are short. Why is the "a" long in a word like "gate"? Well, that would be a vowel-consonant-e syllable, and that means that the "e" makes the vowel be long. Why is the "o" short in words like "bottle"? If you break down the word "bottle" into two syllables, you'll see that the first syllable is closed, and the next syllable is a consonant-le syllable. But why is the "o" long in a word like "noble"? Well, if your child has learned the rules about breaking down the consonant-le syllable, they will see that there is an open syllable at the beginning of the word "noble," and the rule about open syllables is that the "o" makes the long sound. Now, as you can see, teaching syllable types will help a child know where to break the word apart and which vowel sound to use.
If you'd like to see a list of some of the different syllable types in the English language, go to the parentteacherbridge.com/syllabletypes. You can find the link in the description below.
Not every reading curriculum out there takes on an Orton-Gillingham approach. So, if you'd like to see a list of some of the programs that do cover reading in an Orton-Gillingham approached way, check out the link in the description below. I have a homeschool link for those of you who are considering homeschooling, and you will find several different programs that you can use for a full-on curriculum. If your child is in a public school, their teacher may use the Barton Reading Program or the Wilson Reading Program. These are quite common and easy to find online as well. Now, more and more teachers are finding out about how to work with children with dyslexia and the Orton-Gillingham approach. So, there are some online programs where you can train yourself, or if you want to suggest something to your child's teacher, they can look into that as well. Just make sure the program is accredited. You can find a link in the description below of several different accredited services.
Parents, I hope that wasn't too overwhelming and that you found this video helpful. Please share with a friend if you did. Don't forget to click like on this video so that I know that you did like it. Click subscribe if you'd like more useful videos to help with your child's education. Don't forget, you can get my free guide, "Five Quick Tips to Immediately Help Your Struggling Reader." That's in the description below as well. And remember, you are your child's most influential teacher.