Tag: Orton Gillingham approach

The word has was used in several of the initial stories in this blog.  I made it a “red word” since the student had not yet learned the phonogram, h.   In addition, the letter s in has two sounds – /s/ and /z/ – which can be a challenging concept for some young students to…

Speech sounds are classified as voiced and unvoiced.  Ask a student to watch your mouth as you say the /b/ sound or the word ball.  Then, ask them to watch you say the /p/ sound or the word pig. The placement of your lips is the same, but the /p/ is unvoiced and produces air…

“The phonics lessons usually start with the a card for the short-a sound (apple /a/) and with four or five consonant cards for letters which have only a single sound, are not easily confused with one another, and can be combined to form several phonetic three-letter words that the pupils know by ear……Other groups of…

Now that the students have had practice with the red words, has and a, we will take away the red color in the font to pave the way for new red words in subsequent stories.  Also, remember to monitor letter formation if students are starting to write some of the decodable words!  Many students write…

The consonant n was introduced in the previous story entitled, Nab.  Unlike the letters j and h, the letter n can be at the beginning and at the end of a word.  It is important to point this out to young students so they begin to understand what happens when we manipulate the letters and…

June Orton recommended Florence Akin’s Word Mastery to the tutors she was training.  She did not use Anna Gillingham’s manual. (The History of the Orton-Gillingham Approach; OGA’s Academy News, Winter/Spring 2024).  Florence Akin’s Word Master was published in 1913 and can still be found online today!

June Lyday Orton worked alongside her husband in his New York clinic. When he died in 1948, she spent a year taking courses and moved to Winston-Salem, NC at the invitation of Dr. Lloyd Thompson.  She opened a clinic modeled on Dr. Orton’s one in New York City. She felt comfortable working in a medical…

The next phonogram in June Orton’s scope and sequence is the consonant j. Did you know that no English word ends in a j?  If one uses this scope and sequence, the student’s word bank includes decodable words including: at, bat, fat, mat, am, bam, Sam, ham, jam, ab, jab, Tab, and Bab.  Nonsense words…

Learning to print or write the letters as they learn the letter names and sounds makes writing meaningful to the pupils from the beginning, and these motor patterns form a valuable link in the memory chain……Attention is given to forming each letter from left-to-right to establish proper directionality and spacing…” (Orton, A Guide To Teaching…

June Orton states, “Readiness training for phonics will include the development of good speech patterns and oral vocabulary, visual differentiation of letter shapes, auditory discrimination of speech sounds, motor control of pencil and paper, awareness of laterality and left-to-right directionality, general perceptual-motor skills.” (Orton, A Guide to Teaching Phonics, Educators Publishing Service, 1976).  For more…