Orton-Gillinham

I would try the book “Reading Reflex” first. This is all that many second graders would need. If you don’t want to do the tutoring yourself, then look for a certified Phono-Graphix tutor. For most kids, this would be a faster path to remediation and a lot less expensive. I would look into OG only if PG isn’t enough.

Second grade is not too early. In fact, it’s a lot easier to remediate at this age than an older child. Most schools, unfortunately, wait until a child is failing 3rd grade before they start remediating.

Liz

My daughter is in the First Grade, will be 7 this spring. She started O-G in the fall. An appropriate program at the appropriate time. She is doing well with this.

I am not O-G trained, nor do I have a financial interest of any sort in O-G. O-G tutors are well-trained and achieve great results with rather difficult cases. 1st and 2nd grades are ideal times to begin intervention. Just make sure the child is not overwhelmed with too many hours of tutoring and reading activities. There must be time to plan and enjoy. Plenty of time to play and enjoy. If God had given your little one the potential to be another Picasso or Arthur Ashe, it would be a shame for those talents to have not developed. The only downside of many of the expensive interventions is they involve little or no work in fluency or comprehension. Ken

What, in your opinion, IS best for fluency - other than practice? My daughter had 2 yrs of 2x/wkly LMB and has comprehension off the chart; however, multisyllabic words are still troublesome and fluency not what I expected.

I often wonder if my expectations are too high - her teacher does NOT seem concerned and I was reading like an Ace in 1st grade. She scores very high in reading comprehension.

Ken C. wrote:
>
> I am not O-G trained, nor do I have a financial interest of
> any sort in O-G. O-G tutors are well-trained and achieve
> great results with rather difficult cases. 1st and 2nd
> grades are ideal times to begin intervention. Just make sure
> the child is not overwhelmed with too many hours of tutoring
> and reading activities. There must be time to plan and
> enjoy. Plenty of time to play and enjoy. If God had given
> your little one the potential to be another Picasso or Arthur
> Ashe, it would be a shame for those talents to have not
> developed. The only downside of many of the expensive
> interventions is they involve little or no work in fluency or
> comprehension. Ken

This may be something that has already been tried, but I’ve had children read lists of phrases that contain words with their newly acquired sounds. They reread them, too, until their reading sounds more fluent. I’ve also had them do timed rereadings and tape-recorded rereadings, so that the children can monitor their own progress (they get faster, have fewer errors). When fluency is an issue, I also look at the type of text—sometimes it’s still just too hard.

Does anyone have any other suggestions? I’ve heard about a program called “Read Naturally,” but I don’t know much about it

Leah, are you familiar with Great Leaps? I wondered as you were asking about fluency under Ken Campbell’s post, and he happens to be the author of that program! Many of us around here use Great Leaps for fluency. It is a cost effective program because it contains several levels of work in one book. Whereas, I think Read Naturally has a separate set for every grade level. That would be much more expensive if you needed to use it over time.

http://www.greatleaps.com/

Janis

Amen, Ken! My thoughts exactly! I just wrote a post to a dyslexic adult who is interested in teaching. I explained that is is possible, but probably some remediation would have to happen first. I urged her to examine the things she is really good at, as I think each of us is given the underlying skills for whatever purpose it is that we are put on this earth. We do not all have to have a 4 year degree to be successful in God’s sight. There is great freedom in realizing that.

Janis

Jami’s tutor used a combination of things with her: Great leaps, LMB, DPSL (Depaul School something or other - curriculum that they use at the local LD school, I think) and V/V. So…

I’ve heard OG is great follow up. It’s those multisyllabic words I worry about. She’s doing well in school (A’s in reading) and very well %-wise on FCAT (yearly assessment); however decoding is barely in the 60% percentile. Again, maybe I’M expecting too much?

I have just heard about that 4th grade blockage and don’t want that to happen. I’m the HYPERVIGILANT mom. :-).

Funny story, one time she was reading about a person named Robin. When they got to the 4th comprehension question It asked something like, where did the possum live? The tutor said Jami looked at her and said, You mean this story is about a possum? (She still got 4 out of 5 questions correct) Go figure.

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Dear Margaret,

I am clinically trained (3 hours college credit + at least the same amount of time in supervised practica) for both Orton-Gillingham and Lindamood-Bell LiPS. With most 1st-2nd grade students, I begin by assuring myself that the student is well grounded in sound-symbol relationships using LiPS and then proceed to single syllable work blending both methods—very small amounts of multi-syllable work at this age. The program I like for younger students is SPIRE published by Progress Learning in Kennebunk, ME. You might take a look at their scope & sequence. It is really ideal as a preventive model tool.

SPIRE is age appropriate for any student through about 11-12 years of age. However, sometimes, I choose the faster pace pure OG (using Wilson Langauge materials) for older students who may generalize abstract concepts more quickly.

Available in SPIRE…or add Great Leaps…or Read Naturally. Just thought I’d throw that in…

But the OG are Wilson are NOT the same, correct? B/c You said pure PG with Wilson materials. We have Wilson providers in my area (Though the one I know personally was an unhappy 1st grade teacher who just last year moved to the local “special” hospital here in town so, though I like her, I wouldn’t want her tutoring my daughter. I guess I got confused OG WITH Wilson materials - or is OG the method and Wilson just the material used? (I’m just guessing)

BTW, Susan, I sent you an email re our prev. conversations.

Wilson is a program which was developed from OG. There is an excellent article on this site which explains some of the multi-sensory structured language approaches to reading:

http://www.ldonline.org/ld_indepth/reading/mssl_methods.html

“From the original Orton-Gillingham method, many variations have been developed. Some of the modified Orton-Gillingham methods written by Orton students are The Slingerland Method, The Spalding Method, Project Read, Alphabetic Phonics, The Herman Method, and The Wilson Method. Other works included in which the authors of the programs used the tenets of Orton’s work, but were not directly trained by Orton-Gillingham personnel are The Alphabetic- Phonetic- Structural -Linguistic approach to Literacy (Shedd), Sequential English Education (Pickering), and Starting Over (Knight). The Association Method (DuBard), and the Lindamood-Bell Method (Lindamood -Bell) have as their basis the research into hearing impaired and the language impaired individuals”

Janis

The Wilson Language materials are *based* on OG methods. Everything isn’t perfectly identical to the OG manual—nor should it necessarily have to be. What I was trying to say (albeit not very successfully if I was this unclear), is that I may not follow the sequence exactly. I would test the student to know what they *know* and then “fill those holes” and not teach the previously-learned skills. Some Wilson tutors start at one of two places in Book 1 and do every lesson in order past that point.

For kids who have single syllable down fairly well in closed, open, and silent-e patterns, I would *quickly* review those as an introduction (so that I’m sure they know why the vowels act as they do) and this hooks to prior knowledge. Brain needs a hook to something previously learned. Then I check to be sure that they can segment & blend at least 6 sounds with initial and final blends. Then, I go to my scope/sequence using Wilson Language Materials. I have made some of my own materials, too. The rest is too complex to write about in a brief space.

You’ll find a good tutor, Leah. Even if your daughter is reading on grade-level, keep her going. The reading will get harder and no one will teach her any language structure reading tools. She’s too bright to have that happen to her. (Of course, I don’t feel any child is ignorant enough to ignore. Just that her potential is so high. Unlike federal laws of IDEA, I do believe in maximizing a child’s potential. Average achievement just isn’t okay for gifted kids.)

Hope I answered your question. If not, I know you’ll follow up… :-)

Think I got it this time. You know me, I’ll keep plugging. I’m looking into the O-G tutors this week (if I can find my list….:-).) And I’ll gather the information needed to make that “educated” (?!) decision.

Another question, if she is reading fairly well, do you think Summer only tutoring would suffice? Say, 2-3x wkly?

She was SO happy when her LMB tutoring ended during the school year. Usually she gets some kind of tutoring over the summer (at least 2x wkly). Last year it was in writing to prepare her for 4th grade FCAT writing. I really don’t think she will score more than average there, though, even with the tutoring.

I often wonder where that fine line is between expecting too much and/or too little. She made a “B” on her spelling test this week (without much studying) (thanks LMB!), and I said, “Hey, babe, a “B” in spelling is a gift for you without studying-don’t sweat it”.

///

I like the intensity of 2-3X weekly during the summer. I’ve seen huge gains when frequency of tutorial is 3x weekly. Then, during Christmas break, do a couple of review sessions just to see what she’s retained. If she’s not retaining, go to 1x weekly during school year until it’s solid.

Sounds good. Fortunately she usually retains pretty well. The tutor says ONCE it GETS to long term she doesn’t forget - it’s just getting it there. Thanks for the advice. I think it’s a schedule we can both live with!

The 60th percentile is comfortably within the average range of achievement. With the mean at 50%, I would not see this score as a problem. It would probably be represented by a standard score of 110 or so, so what’s the matter?

Yes, multi-syllabic words are a “bear.” The kids who have great oral vocabularies do the best, and there needs to be teaching and practice for several years to achieve the automaticity.

My students have the skills to decode multisyllabic words because I teach them. However, getting my studnets to APPLY those skills is the issue. The patterns that I find include frequently getting the first and last syllables correct, and guessing across the middle, which can result in adding or deleting syllables. They do know how to chunk the words into parts, but they continue to want to use their impulsive, look and guess style even when they can correctly chunk and decode a long word. So, I must work with them to “force” them to apply the skills we have worked on in the resource room.

Improvements come, but they are slow. I do have to wonder if we could isolate the kids who have this brand of decoding difficulty (the tendency to look at words as whole and the failure to decode words sequentially, for various reasons per their LD) and if we placed those kids exclusively in decodable text from the getgo, no natural language, no real sight words, might they learn to correctly decode words sequentially from left to right while still in K-2?

I know that is part of what strong decoding programs ala O-G hope to do, the problem is that so many kids don’t have the sequential processing issues that teachers do teach the phonics, but there is still a great deal of sight reading and these kids build really bad habits. I also believe many of them really don’t know how to attack a word, while the nonLD kid gets the L-R stuff w/o having to be explicitly taught it.

Parenting Child with LD BB Under “threads move too fast”. Thanks

I couldn’t agree with you more, Anitya. The kids I’ve worked with privately all learn how to decode multi-syllable words, and they do it capably in our sessions, but getting them to do that outside the confines of our tutoring session is another story. Many retreat to those bad habits of sounding out the first one or two syllables, then guessing, especially since they feel rushed to get their work done. They don’t want to take the necessary time to apply their skills. I always wish I could send them back to class with an aide who’ll make them take the time each and every time.

So the only thing I can do is work with them over and over and over again on these skills in the hopes of getting them to the point of automaticity. But I don’t see some of them often enough and of course, there’s always so much else to work with during our time together.

My experience with LMB is that the kids get really good at it, but they can’t use it well in connected text. Once LMB gets children up to the point where they are aware of sound-symbol relationships and sound sequencing, it’s time to move on to Orton or something else. One old tried and true method to develop fluency is Glass Analysis. I took the course from Dr. Glass, and he was biased, but I have used his materials, and they work with no muss, no fuss. They are a simple set of flashcards and a scripted drill for a few minutes a day. The theory behind it is close to Orton, but it is designed to develop fluency. I developed my spelling materials based on Glass, and the kids who are using the spelling are improving their reading fluency too! If you are interested in Glass, I don’t know where to buy it, but he used to work out of Adelphi University in Garden City, New York. Dr. Glass must be retired or even deceased by now, but the college can help you find the materials. My spelling stuff is on my website@ www.gwhizresources.com. You can see how and why the Glass Analysis works there too.
Fern

Glass Analysis helps develop fluency in reading multisyllable words, and it’s easy to use. You can contact Adelphi University in Garden City, NY to find out where to get the flashcards. I found a website www.glassanalysis.com. I wrote a spelling book series based on Glass Analysis that uses the techniques in connected text. Check it out at www.gwhizresources.com. I have my 8th graders with 4th grade reading levels reading sentences like: “The ignorant immigrant learned about irrigation.” in just 4 weeks!!
Fern

I am under the impression that to use LMB and Wilson well you need to take the training courses. I took the one-hour intro seminar about Wilson, and I don’t feel competent at all to use the materials. I took the 3-day LMB course, which was better than a one-day, but it was very hard to do on my own afterwards. (Happily, we had other staff members who had more training and we helped each other). How much training do you think is necessary to learn Wilson well if I haven’t taken any Orton seminars?
Fern G.

i find that sentence a little offensive, i know you are teaching something in that sentence, but all i got was a bad feeling, i personally would not use a sentence like that,

dave

I’m sorry, but the word “ignorant” merely means uninformed, not stupid, a distinction that I teach my students. The lesson is about reading and spelling words with IG in them. My grandparents were immigrants, my children were immigrants (they were born in Europe), so that made me an immigrant there when I lived in France. No insult intended.
Fern

This one’s not so technical — I wrote it for a homeschooling magazine; it’s called “Multisensory Structured Language Programs - Summary and reflections” and you’ll find it at
http://www.resourceroom.net/OGLists/index.asp

Nice article, Sue. :-)

Janis

I have been using Glass Analysis in conjuntion with some of Seeing Stars (LMB) techniques with my fourth grade son. What is impressing me is that I can see the changes is his ability to hold letters in his head visually. I think I am getting more movement than I would with Seeing Stars alone because he is starting to think in terms of groups of letters which allows him to hold longer words in his head. The other day he spelled battery right the first time.

We are only on the starter words so are far from words like immigrants!!

I have word lists but not flash cards so am just writing the words on a white board.

Beth

The best program I have used for teaching multi-syllable words is Rewards written by Anita Archer. It is sold by Sopris West. My 8th graders are reading grade level science and social studies texts with very few errors. We are on lesson 16 out of 20 lessons. Most of them are know reading this material at 130 -150 words read correctly per minute. Rewards teaches a strategy for dealing with prefixes- suffixes and many different syllables. It is ver effective.

How old do you think kids should be to use the Rewards program? My son is in fourth grade and has a fourth grade vocabulary. I guess I was wondering whether the vocabulary would be above him.

Beth

Beth,
At our school they start Rewards in 4th grade. According to the VP at our school it’s designed for 4th through (now, I’m guessing on this one) 6th?

I think you could find this out on the web. Just do a quick search on Google.

I’ve read of others saying very good things about Rewards so it may be worth using.

Laura,

That is good to know. I am going to go through Glass Analysis first because it at least starts with less than a syllable. For example, the first pattern was “at”, the second was “ing”. I think this would be good first. But, I’m afraid, I will have to teach him syllables more explicitly too.

Beth

Nan,
I’ve used Rewards also and liked it. This year’s group I’ve put off using it because, in general, their decoding and vocabulary skills are not ready for those long words. But my question to you is, how long does it take you to complete a lesson? Since I have elementary students in 50 minute blocks—it took me one and 1/2 classes to get through a lesson. We started too late in the year and never got to the longer context reading lessons after lesson 13. It took me longer with elementary kids, I think, because they do not know the meanings of lots of the words used. Thanks for the input.
Ann