My Heros: Orton and Gillingham

When I first started on this journey with my own children, I kept hearing the names Orton and Gillingham come up in conversations, on internet blogs, advertising for various reading interventions and I wanted to know more...Who are these strangely hyphenated names and what is their connection/contribution to helping my children learn to read? I dug until I found out all about them and THEY ARE MY HEROS! I know you’ll love them, too...

Samuel Torrey Orton (1879-1948) was a neuropsychiatrist and pathologist who studied reading difficulty in cognitively typical children starting in the 1920’s. He focused his attention on children who struggled to learn to read despite being typically functional, hitting childhood milestones-often these children displayed high verbal intelligence, mathematical, social skills, but had extreme difficulties learning to read, for an unknown (at that time) reason. He found that children with language processing disorders needed reading, phonics and reading instruction broken down into manageable chunks using a multi-sensory approach. He developed a set of teaching strategies and approaches that worked to support and build successful reading skills with this population of children.

During the 1930s-1940s he teamed up with Anna Gillingham (1878-1963) a well-known educator and psychologist who had an uncanny ability to understand and breakdown language skills into rules (orthographic mapping and phonics). The two worked together to create instructional materials for teachers to support this student population. The Orton-Gillingham methodology is still considered the gold standard approach to help students with language processing disorders like dyslexia, dyscalculia and dysgraphia.

The cornerstone of the Orton-Gillingham methodology is that through explicit, systematic, multi-sensory teaching, it builds connections between letters, sounds (phonics) to decode words. Orton-Gillingham’s work pioneered effective literacy programs. Practitioners are trained to use sight, hearing, touch and movement to help students make meaningful reading connections in a systemic, explicit, 1:1, foundational approach-teaching over 374+ phonics rules.

I LOVE Orton-Gillingham for giving the gift of literacy to EVERY child who walks through my doors. My HEROS!