Step Number One: Decorate with Intent Don't get me wrong, decorating your classroom is so much fun and I am not here to tell you to not decorate. However, decorating your classroom with intent is step number one towards making your classroom dyslexia friendly. What do I mean by decorate with intent? Make sure everything you put up in your classroom has a purpose. Especially on the walls. Use this space to help your students. Place posters strategically at eye level and don't crowd the space. Make sure your alphabet banner has pictures that represent the sounds the letters make. This will help ..read more

Read about some of my go-to resources when I was teaching full time in an Orton-Gillingham based classroom. I taught 1st-3rd graders in the classroom; however, I have worked with Pre-K to 8th grade students- these resources are useful for all grade levels. I absolutely could not have done it without these amazing resources! I am an Associate Member of the Orton-Gillingham Academy (formerly AOGPE) and hope to eventually finish the Certified Member training.  This post is perfect for those who are just beginning to embark on receiving formal Orton-Gillingham training and will be implementin ..read more

Before adding any concept to a literacy center for students to practice independently, it is important that the concept had previously been explicitly and directly taught by the teacher. Centers are great for a spiral review of concepts previously taught. You can set up Science of Reading based literacy centers during the time you work with small groups and/or have a teacher time center rotation. Task Cards Center SOR Based Task Boxes are a a great option for review. You can find task boxes ranging from phonemic awareness to morphology here Cursive Writing Have students review cursive letters ..read more

When it comes to your classroom instruction, decodable readers support an explicit and direct structured literacy teaching approach supported by The Science of Reading. I have listed a few of my favorites that I use during my Orton-Gillingham tutorial sessions as well as my classroom small groups. Decodable readers also make a great addition to your classroom library! As we do away with leveled readers, we can reorganize those to be categorized by themes instead of levels in our classroom library! No need to get rid of all of the books you have collected during your teaching journey, simply ch ..read more

Take a moment to think about how you teach spelling and reading? What strategies do you use and suggest to students when teaching them how to read and spell? Do these strategies involve looking at the pictures? Using context clues to guess the words? If you answered yes to the last two questions above, consider the following: When looking at a picture are you actually reading a word or are you identifying an object in a picture? These are two different processes in our brains. Our brains were wired to identify objects; however, we were not born knowing how to read. Reading is something that n ..read more

Hi friends! There has been a LOT of buzz about switching from word walls to sound walls this year. I am so happy to be hearing all of the buzz and seeing teachers diving into learning a "new" way of teaching reading. I say "new" because the research has been around for years!! Finally, the switch is happening. Let's talk about what a sound wall is and the benefits of a sound wall versus a word wall. Sound Wall vs. Word Wall To be 100% honest, I never had a word wall in my classroom. Since I first started my teaching career in 2013, I was trained in Orton-Gillingham with the Orton-Gillingham Ac ..read more

First, let's talk about how to set them up! Whether you bought the complete bundle, or an individual task box, setting up is all the same. Print out the printable pdf document on card stock paper, then cut out the individual cards and place them in the laminator. Laminating the cards will help with durability and also allow students to use dry erase markers on the task cards. After laminating, cut out the individual cards. The cards have a letter in the top right corner to help you keep them in order and for students to check their answers on the check your answers card. You're done the harde ..read more

Not everyone has sand laying around their house. They may have shaving cream...but oh what a mess that can make! But it is soo fun! This got me thinking. Many of us are tutoring online during these days of distance learning. So how can we make our Orton-Gillingham lessons multi-sensory when not everyone has sand trays. So I decided to take a look in my pantry for alternatives to sand trays. If it is in my pantry, then it most likely is in the kitchens at my students' homes. I thought if I can find a way to make my online lessons more multi-sensory for my students at home, then they may be more ..read more

Are you a traveling tutor, Dyslexia Therapist, or resource teacher looking for ideas on how to take your supplies around with you?  When I worked at a private practice as the Director of Dyslexia Therapy. The summer was wonderful for me as students came to my office from 8 am until 5pm Monday through Thursday and I had all of my supplies with me and accessible. When the school year begun, I traveled to area private schools to provide Dyslexia Therapy using the Orton-Gillingham Approach to my clients during their school day. I also worked after school until 7/8 pm providing Dyslexia Therap ..read more

Are you curious to know exactly what RED WORDS are? How to teach them? Are you wondering, why are they difficult to spell? *Scroll to the bottom for a list of red words!* Hopefully I can answer some of your questions! My teaching career so far has only been in private schools and working primarily with students diagnosed with dyslexia. When I hear talk about sight words and high frequency words, the two terms often get mixed up and I certainly get confused. I teach using the Orton-Gillinham Approach which is a direct and explicit way of teaching children how to read. We also teach students how ..read more