What is Orton-Gillingham Approach?
Dyslexia and the Orton-Gillingham Approach
Dyslexia is a neurobiological learning disorder characterized by difficulty reading and spelling in individuals who are receiving adequate classroom instruction and do not have cognitive deficits.
Individuals with dyslexia may have difficulty:
Reading, writing and spelling
Learning the names and sounds of letters
Making sense of unfamiliar words
Rhyming Words (identifying word endings that are the same)
Attending to tasks and following directions
Sequencing
Managing frustration
Copying written language
Math
Recognizing letters that look the same and writing letters the “right way”
The Orton-Gillingham Approach was developed by Samuel Torrey Orton (1879-1948), a neuropsychiatrist, and Anna Gillingham (1878-1963), an educator and psychologist, to help struggling readers by explicitly teaching them the relationship between letters and sounds.
10 essential elements of the Orton-Gillingham Approach
Multi-sensory
Phonetic and alphabetic
Synthetic/Analytic
Structured
Sequential
Repetitive
Cumulative
Cognitive
Diagnostic
Prescriptive