Adventures in Orton-Gillingham, Part 1

One of the things I did for myself this summer was to enroll in an Orton-Gillingham Comprehensive training. I'd been trained at a previous school in Lindamood Bell and found that systematic phonics instruction really helped my students, particularly those whose first or primary language was not English.While the intensity of this training can't be minimized, it was something life-changing. I feel so strongly that this approach to phonics will push my struggling readers to greater success.Why shouldn't it? Orton-Gillingham incorporates all three learning modalities - visual, auditory, and kineshetic. And how is most direct instruction delivered? If you said auditorially, you would be correct.  Just by re-thinking how much of a lesson is delivered in each modality and adjusting has got to help.My first goal for the new school year has been to convince my administrators and coaches of implementing OG with my safety net readers in place of the district-preferred LLI (Fountas Pinnell). Thankfully Orton Gillingham has a built-in data collection process so that the request for collecting data as proof of the program's effectiveness with my students will be natural.Yesterday, our second day of school, I taught the students the routine for learning red words, or high frequency, irregularly decoded words. Today I'll target my safety net readers and administer the OG Level 1 test as a baseline.We are on our way toward what I know will be effective instruction for kids who really, really need to make sense of the print in front of them.

Reading About Reading

Although widely thought of as a math geek, at least as far as elementary math pedagogy is concerned, I am spending some time this summer researching literacy.The first book on my "must read" list happens to be Richard Allington's What Really Matters for Struggling Readers. It will come as no surprise that many of my readers struggle, and so far I've found Allington's work very informative and affirming.  Maybe that has a lot to do with the Daily Five and its structures; many of these are based on Allington's work.When I think about fluency, I know rereading an appropriate level text is important.  Allington advocates for a couple of strategies that have enormous potential with my readers: Tape, Check, Chart and Tape, Time, Chart (Allington, R. What Really Matters for Struggling Readers. (2012). Boston: Pearson Education. p 110-111).When I take a running record of a child's reading, I always share what the checkmarks and codes mean. In Tape, Check, Chart, students read a short text into a tape recorder, mark it up using child-friendly markings, and over the course of multiple readings (Allington suggests 4 with a different color pen for each mark-up) increase fluency and accuracy.  Tape, Time, Chart provides similar practice with fluency.As I think about Daily Five activities for the coming school year, I know that the addition of these two choices will be powerful, not only for the students but for me.

A Reteachable Moment

I've been using Lindamood Bell as an intervention with my struggling 3rd grade readers.  They are getting the labelling and the production - lip poppers, tongue coolers, scrapers and we've been working on the Vowel Circle. After nailing CVC  and CVCe (that's short vowel and magic e words to the unintitated), I was feeling pretty confident that we could do blends -- you know two consonants together and you can hear both sounds.Well, it took some doing, but we we working our way through a word chain full of  beginning blends by touching felt squares to physically segment each sound. Plan to plane, plane to flane, flane to flame -- the "words"  don't have to be real words in case you were thinking I'd gone off my nut.  And then I asked if anyone in the group could think of a word that began with the /pl/ sound.Plan - playground - play - please.... all good stuff, right? Until I came to my last little guy who very proudly and in a clear voice offered  prostitute.Must-keep-a-straight-face! Where in the world did this kid pull up this word? Usually when he responds to anything it's with a monosyllabic mumble!As I said, you can't make this stuff up. We'll be revisiting blends next Monday.