Written by Ms. Doetzer, Elementary Teacher

  The Orton-Gillingham Approach is designed to help students with Dyslexia, which affects 1 in 5 children. Once you’ve been through the Orton-Gillingham training, there are a lot of fun ways to incorporate it into your classroom! These activities won’t just help those affected by Dyslexia, but will help every child in your classroom become more successful readers and spellers. Here are a few ideas that I’ve used in my own classroom!  

1. Display resources on the walls and make Orton-Gillingham based bulletin boards for students to refer to when they struggle recalling a sound, spelling rule, etc. Our students need continuous review in order to strengthen the pathways between short and long-term memory and to help them retrieve information from their long-term memory. These resources have pictures of the keywords that help the students recall the information. Here are some pictures from my classroom:

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2. Orton-Gillingham Based Task Boxes and Literacy Centers. Incorporate Orton-Gillingham based task boxes into your small group reading sessions and/or literacy centers. You can also use them as informal assessments!

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3. Playing games provides for a great review of previously taught concepts! You can also play games during small group reading sessions! Here are some ideas:

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4. File Folder Activities. Another easy way to differentiate and use the Orton-Gillingham Approach in the classroom is through the use of file folder activities! They are so easy to make, store, and pull out when needed! Use as a literacy center, early finishers, or whatever you can think of!

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5. Finally, make your classroom library dyslexia friendly! Adding phonetic readers to your classroom library will increase independence and prevent your struggling readers from just flipping through the pages of a book during silent reading time. You could also use these readers to create comprehension questions for your struggling readers. Perhaps each student has a journal with comprehension questions for the phonetic readers that are at their level. I also recently discovered that you can buy them for Kindle right on Amazon! Click here for a link to S.P.I.R.E Phonetic Readers on Amazon!

  It is my hope that you got a new idea or a new inspiration for how to reinforce skills learned using the Orton-Gillingham Approach in your classroom!