My Approach
My approach to reading and writing intervention follows a specific process.
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Intake and Assess - This is an opportunity for me to review any previous assessments that your child may have had and the perform my own informal literacy skills based assessments and curriculum based assessment to fully understand where your child falls in their literacy skills and to get a benchmark to measure progress throughout our time together.
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Design - Based on the results of all assessments and getting to know your child and their learning style, I will design a learning program specific to them while following a framework of literacy support based on the Orton-Gillingham approach.
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Implement - I will then implement your child's personal learning plan using a multisensory and structured approach that meets your child exactly where they are at and will be adjusted as necessary throughout our time together.
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Measure - Regular progress monitoring will be a part of the plan and I will provide brief lesson notes after each lesson along with regular parent consultations and three progress reports throughout the school year.
About Orton-Gillingham
The Orton-Gillingham (O-G) approach is exactly that, an approach. It is highly structured, sequential, prescriptive, diagnostic and multisensory. What this means is that when we work with a student, we work with them at their level using a systematic and sequential order of literacy instruction - always working from the simple to the complex. Just like a home needs a solid foundation, so do readers and writers. The O-G approach ensures that a solid foundation is built before moving onto more complex concepts.
The Orton-Gillingham approach is the result of the work of Dr. Samuel T. Orton and Anna Gillingham. It's roots are deep spanning over 80 years. As a neuropsychiatrist and pathologist, Dr. Orton studied children with language and literacy processing difficulties such as dyslexia. Together with educator and psychologist, Anna Gillingham, they created techniques to teach reading that integrated kinesthetic (movement-based) and tactile (sensory-based) learning strategies with teaching of visual and auditory concepts.
About Multisensory Structured Literacy
Structured Literacy is a term coined by the International Dyslexia Association. It is a form of research-based literacy instruction that is phonics-based reading instruction, systematic reading instruction, and synthetic phonics (among others), this method has been around for nearly a century.
Using this wholistic approach to literacy support enables students to learn at their pace and their level while creating a strong foundation all the while using multisensory, kinesthetic and tactile methods to solidify learning.