As a key step, you will want to assess your child’s learning style to know what type of learning activities serve your child best.  If your child is primarily a visual or auditory learner, you’re in luck! Virtually all Orton Gillingham reading programs use visual and auditory components or activities.

The OG approach we know today is based on a method developed by Anna Gillingham, who was a psychologist and research associate of Dr. Samuel Orton, a medical doctor who worked with children with reading difficulties. He used the then 25-year-old term congenital word blindness to describe their condition but today we call it dyslexia (Henry & Brickley, 1999; Orton, 1929).  The Orton-Gillingham method, an explicit, multisensory, structured language approach to teaching reading. Orton was aware that the new teaching method of the time—the whole language approach—was problematic for these children. The same goes for today.  Dr. Orton even published an article in an educational psychology publication when phonics instruction was about to be forbidden in favor of these new, progressive, “whole-word” reading programs, one of the many shots fired in what would become known 50 years later as the Reading Wars. 

Structured Literacy, the term for Orton Gillingham

Now used by the International Dyslexia Association, is described as: