“Why is it important for my child to produce the phonics sounds?”
Trouble with the production of phonics sounds, or phonemes, and the segmentation of sounds into words can be a wake-up call for parents of young children. It is the first indicator that a child may have a reading problem. Tutoring in phonological awareness teaches children how to produce sounds with accuracy through the use of manipulatives even before letter names are introduced. Children are also taught sound segmentation – where one sound ends and another begins – and recognition of rhyming sounds. The tools that this tutor uses are Lindamood-Bell pre-reading techniques and the Phonemic Awareness Kit from Linguisystems.
Current research indicates that the best reading outcomes are achieved when intensive reading and pre-reading interventions take place in the pre-primary and early primary grades, and when reading methods are systematic, sequential, multi-sensory, phonological and research-based, as Orton-Gillingham interventions are.
Why are reading, handwriting, and spelling so difficult for my child?”
Children may need a more sophisticated reading system than they are getting in the classroom and may need one-on-one tutoring. Orton-Gillingham is an entire tutorial curriculum that has a structured multi-sensory approach to alphabetic phonics. It is important for children (or adolescents and adults) with reading and writing issues to have explicit, organized instruction in the phonics code. Students must be taught how to decode works in sequence, each phoneme laying the groundwork for the next. There must be a presentation of the rules of spelling and written language as well. Students learn how to sound-out and break-down syllables. In each lesson the child learns a phoneme, reads and writes words containing that phoneme, then reads and writes sentences in which the phoneme appears. In this way, Orton-Gillingham integrates reading, writing, and spelling. Handwriting, which is taught explicitly, is a language task.
Multi-sensory instruction is also an important feature of the Orton-Gillingham technique. Instruction that is multi-sensory uses all the pathways to the brain – at the same time hearing, seeing, touching, writing, and speaking. Because many children with reading problems cannot learn words by sight, it is particularly important to use a sand tray for sight words.