Looping is an incredible gift for teachers when it comes to honing our practice and self-reflection. One year, I took the opportunity to loop with my class from fourth grade to fifth grade. The first year we were together, we had a peaceful classroom, the students worked hard, our community was strong, and many students showed a lot of growth. But there were still a few who, at the end of the year, I worried I had not provided the right supports and interventions for. The beauty of looping is that you get a second chance, and something incredible took place the summer before they entered fifth grade.
I was selected to participate in a 40-hour Orton Gillingham training. The selection was unusual because they initially said they would only take teachers from kindergarten through second grade, where phonics and phonological awareness are traditionally taught. What a gift to have been able to participate! Because while decoding skills should be taught in the lower grades, as a fourth and fifth grade teacher, I have found that most of my students come to me with enormous gaps in this area. Gaps in decoding can hold back even the brightest child from successful, joyful, meaningful reading experiences.
The impact that this Orton Gillingham training had on my class (and every class since) was tremendous. I want to use the phrase 'I can't even begin to describe,' but I have to describe! I have to share how participating in this Orton Gillingham training and implementing Orton Gillingham lessons opened doors for my students that had been closed for their first five years of school.
Take, for example, Trey (all names in this post will be pseudonyms). In fourth grade, he came to me on a pre-primer reading level (this is a level before kindergarten). Now, I was a fourth-grade teacher, and at the time, the lowest grade I taught was second grade. My greatest tool to help him was to say, 'Trey, you need to spend more time reading and ask yourself, do your words look right, sound right, and make sense?' If a child cannot read words, how can they tell if the words look right? He did not complete a single assignment that year. When we met weekly with our first-grade reading buddies, his first-grade buddy would read the books to him.
Fast forward to fifth grade. After several weeks of delivering consistent Orton Gillingham lessons, Trey was completing every reading assignment. Were they all perfect? No. But he had the confidence and tools to put words and ideas that made sense on his page. It was never about comprehension with Trey. Read something out loud to him, and he could infer and make incredibly insightful statements. He just couldn't decode the words or write them on his page. That is, until we implemented the Orton Gillingham interventions in my classroom. He kept his same reading buddy that year (the first-grade teacher also looped with her students!), but Trey read the books to him. When we read Linda Sue Park's 'A Long Walk to Water' as a class, Trey would volunteer every day to read out loud. Take a moment to think about what that experience meant to this fifth-grade boy and how it altered his attitude towards school and his future.
And then there was Mel. Mel moved here mid-year from Central America and joined my fourth-grade class in February. He spoke no English, and again, my tools to help him were limited. In fourth grade, Mel's classroom participation and work completion were unsolvable problems for me. But after implementing the Orton Gillingham lessons with his reading group, he eagerly joined my round table crew each day and tried to be the first to answer every question. His confidence soared, and again, another fifth-grader who suddenly had his hand up to read in front of the class at every chance he got.
I could go on about all the students who have been impacted by the Orton Gillingham approach, but out of respect for your time, I will leave you with one more story about my sweet Charli.
We read Gary Paulsen's 'Hatchet' as a fifth-grade class. After the chapter where Brian thinks he will be rescued, only to find out the plane went the other way, I asked my students to write an essay about a time their hopes were dashed and whether or not these hopes had been restored. Charli wrote in her essay that the previous year she had the hope of reading on grade level, but at the end of the year, she knew she had not reached that goal. She then went on to write that her hopes were not completely dashed because she was going to keep trying and now 'knew how to practice reading her words just right.' She grew several reading levels over the course of the year and proudly celebrated her accomplishments at her fifth-grade graduation.
Not only did the Orton Gillingham training help my students grow and instill confidence in them, but it also gave them hope.
Why did the Orton Gillingham lessons make such an enormous difference in my students' reading outcomes?
Let's break it down. The students in my class were incredibly bright. You could see it in their eyes—they were alive with so many thoughts. And when I read stories and novels aloud to them, we had many deep, insightful conversations. But then I would hand a book to them and ask them to read to me. And ask them to tell me about the story. And suddenly… where did all that brilliance go? It was like interacting with totally different children!
Introducing the Simple View of Reading. This model was a total game-changer for me. As the name states, it is simple. You can go a lot more in-depth with the components of successful reading, but this easy visual really helped me understand what I was seeing every day in my classroom.
The Simple View of Reading (Gough & Tunmer, 1986) is as follows:
decoding x language comprehension = reading comprehension
And there it was. My students had language comprehension. They could listen to a story and understand what was happening. But they had very weak decoding skills. As a fourth and fifth-grade teacher, I was at a complete loss for how to remediate this. I used the tools I had seen modeled by other teachers in guided reading and that I had learned in undergraduate methods classes. These tools encouraged guesswork rather than decoding. My favorite tool in the pre-Orton Gillingham days was to ask students if the word 'looked right, sounded right, or made sense.' For students who couldn't decode, they had no way of knowing if a word 'looked right,' and they were well aware that most of the words they were saying didn't 'sound right,' but they lacked so many decoding skills that they could not possibly make the text 'make sense.' It felt hopeless.
How Orton Gillingham lesson plans transformed my classroom
When I began implementing Orton Gillingham lesson plans in my classroom, everything changed. Here is why. Orton Gillingham lesson plans are structured and consistent, explicit, multisensory, and sequential.
I kept the exact same Orton Gillingham lesson routines, in the exact same order, every day (here's a free printable Orton Gillingham lesson template). I worried that by keeping the interventions so rigid and consistent, my students would eventually get bored, but my students THRIVED with this consistency. They loved it. They loved that they knew exactly what to expect and exactly what to do to be successful. After just a few days of these Orton Gillingham lessons, they were able to put all of their mental efforts into learning to decode and encode, rather than trying to figure out how to complete different assignments and tasks.
The explicit nature of the Orton Gillingham lessons sets every child up for success. Children can come to the table with no knowledge of sounds and letters and quickly become proficient decoders because the lessons explicitly teach them how. There is no room for question or confusion. Everyone gets to succeed.
The multisensory approach keeps students engaged and allows them to experience the sounds and letters with four of their senses: sight, hearing, touch, and movement. While this full-body experience was originally considered to be highly effective for students with dyslexia, it has been my experience that all students benefit from a multisensory literacy approach.
Orton Gillingham lessons follow a specific, laid-out scope and sequence. Now, there are different Orton Gillingham scope and sequences that can be followed, and trained educators will often tailor them to their children's needs. In my own classroom, I've created a few versions that suit the needs of my students based on their decoding skills, motivation, attendance, and other factors that contributed to their reading performance (you can download my scope and sequences here for free!). Regardless of the scope and sequence you choose to use, having a structured, sequential plan for introducing sounds and words to students is paramount with the Orton Gillingham approach. Every lesson builds upon previously learned skills and sounds. No lesson will ask a child to read or write using sounds or words they have not learned. This means that every child participating in the intervention experiences success from day one and continues to experience success throughout the course of the interventions.
Often when discussing motivation and confidence in reading, people immediately point to book choice—Are students reading engaging texts that they enjoy and that they see themselves in? This is, of course, incredibly important—I don't want to downplay that and a post on its importance is coming soon! However, the Orton Gillingham lessons I use are set up in a way that builds success into children's everyday reading experiences. They accelerate reading growth at a rate most children have not experienced. And I have found that this is really boosts my students' motivation and confidence. As humans, we love doing things we think we are good at! And we love working hard when we believe we can achieve! The Orton Gillingham approach has given my students this belief, while opening endless doors for them through the power of reading.