Orton-Gillingham

Orton-Gillingham Specialized Tutoring

In the 1930s, neurologist Dr. Samuel T. Orton and educator Anna Gillingham developed the Orton-Gillingham approach, a powerful method for helping students with dyslexia improve their reading skills. This approach combines multi-sensory techniques with a structured understanding of the English language, teaching important elements like phonemes, morphemes, and common spelling rules.

What makes Orton-Gillingham truly special is its multi-sensory approach, engaging auditory, kinesthetic, and visual learning pathways. While it’s particularly effective for students with dyslexia, this method benefits all learners, helping them strengthen their dominant learning styles while reinforcing the others. It’s flexible enough to be used in one-on-one tutoring, small groups, or even large classroom settings, and works well for students of all ages and abilities.

The misconception is that Orton-Gillingham is only for reading remediation, but its impact goes far beyond that. By tapping into each student’s individual learning strengths, we’re able to help students thrive—not just in reading, but across all subjects.

The Orton-Gillingham Approach: A Reading Strategy That Works

Here’s what makes this approach so effective for students:

Multisensory

It engages all learning pathways—sight, sound, touch, and motion—at the same time, helping students fully connect with the material.

Structured

It follows a logical progression, starting with the basics and moving toward more challenging concepts. Each lesson builds on the last, with plenty of practice and review along the way.

Individualized

This approach is tailored to each student’s unique learning needs. Whether in a one-on-one setting or small group, it adapts to what works best for them.

Direct

Everything is clearly explained—rules, goals, and benchmarks—so students know exactly what they’re working toward and how to get there.

Synthetic and Analytic

It teaches students how language works, both as a whole and broken down into its parts, so they can understand and apply language rules with confidence.

The Orton-Gillingham Approach emphasizes:

Phonology

Phonemes are the smallest units of sound in a language, and understanding them is key to learning how to read. Phonological awareness is the foundation of reading skills.

Sound-Symbol Association

We help students connect the sounds they hear with the letters or combinations of letters that represent them, making reading and spelling easier.

Syllables

Students learn the six basic types of syllables and the rules that govern how words are structured, giving them the tools to tackle unfamiliar words with confidence.

Morphology

Just as phonemes are the building blocks of sound, morphemes are the smallest units of meaning. This includes teaching students about base words, roots, prefixes, and suffixes to deepen their understanding of language.

Syntax and Semantics

Understanding how words work together to form sentences and convey meaning is crucial. We focus on grammar, sentence structure, and how language is used in writing to help students improve their reading and communication skills.

At Servidio Education Solutions, we make sure that reading comprehension and fluency are addressed as part of the program. We have found that many Orton Gillingham programs tend to ignore comprehension and fluency and that becomes a bigger issue down the road for students as they are finally able to catch up on their decoding skills but are then behind on other reading skills. It is our mission to break that cycle and help your child to become a well rounded reader.

Orton-Gillingham works because:

Students are able to understand the relationship between words and sounds.
Students explicitly learn spelling rules and when to apply them.
Students are able to decode words for reading.
Students learn to encode words for writing.
Students move on when they have mastered a skill instead of moving on by an arbitrary deadline that someone in the school has set.