Often, parents hear of Orton-Gillingham for the first time when their children are diagnosed with dyslexia. When I talk to parents about online Orton-Gillingham tutoring, they often have lots of questions about how OG works and what it will mean for their kids and for their family. Here are some of the questions I get frequently.
How long does online Orton-Gillingham tutoring take?
Like everything else, It depends. Some students have small gaps in their learning that hold them back. For example, some kids have attended schools without solid phonics instruction and they are missing key pieces of information, like knowing when a vowel makes a long sound when it makes a short sound. Those kids can work with a tutor twice a week for 3 or 6 months and see significant gains once they learn the particular skill they need.
Other students, including those with dyslexia, sometimes need one to three years of more intensive intervention, working with a tutor two or three days a week, to catch up to grade level.
Another factor is the age of the student, because the longer a student has struggled, the more time it takes to catch up. On the other hand, older students are sometimes able to learn more quickly because they “sort of know” lots of the things we teach and can also benefit from more deliberate learning strategies.
How often do we need to meet?
At Deep Roots Learning Solutions, we offer Orton-Gillingham tutoring to students between two and four days per week. This is consistent with the recommendations of lots of dyslexia professionals, including The Orton-Gillingham Academy, which is one of the main organizations that oversees and sets standards for OG tutoring. https://www.ortonacademy.org/faq-items/does-the-og-approach-recommend-a-certain-amount-of-tutoring-per-week/
Can we meet less?
Meeting less than twice a week can make a student’s progress dramatically slower. In fact, meeting just once a week means progress takes more than twice as long because a week is long enough for students to need a lot of review between lessons.
I won’t say we never meet with students once a week. Sometimes it’s the only option due to schedules or finances, particularly on a short-term basis. But in that case, it’s very important to include regular reading at home using the decodable text we recommend.
Can we have shorter meetings?
It truly does take an hour to teach a full OG lesson, for most students. This includes review, introducing a new concept for reading and for spelling, building phonemic awareness and reading plenty of words, sentences, and stories that support what we’ve practiced. It also includes fluency and comprehension components.
For some students, especially younger ones or ones with challenges like autism or ADHD, sitting still for a full hour lesson is counterproductive. We always aim to work with families to create a tutoring plan that works for the student.
What technology should we have at home?
We run our online Orton-Gillingham tutoring sessions on Zoom. While just about any device can run Zoom, it’s preferable for the student to join the meeting from a Windows or Apple computer. A Chromebook runs Zoom but with fewer features. It’s important that the device has enough RAM to run Zoom without freezing or crashing. One thing that helps is freshly restarting the computer before a session.
A strong internet connection is also extremely important.
Beyond that, it’s a matter of what makes the student most comfortable and productive. Many students prefer a mouse to the touchpad on the computer. Students who are younger and focusing on letter formation can also benefit from a touchscreen device, even if it’s an old phone or tablet used in addition to the main computer.
Headphones are helpful for reducing distractions and making sure the audio is clear.
Can we do online tutoring on a Chromebook?
Tutoring on a Chromebook is not impossible, but it’s not ideal. Zoom does not enable Chromebook users to annotate on the screen or take control of the host’s mouse. This limits the ways we can ask a student to mark up what they are reading or play games.
However, if a Chromebook is the device you have available, Google products (Docs and Jamboard, mainly) give students more options.
How old should my child be for online Orton-Gillingham tutoring?
I used to say, “no younger than third grade.” For a lot of students, an in-person connection is very important to their learning. However, in 2020, I started working with some younger students and now I say, “It depends.” Students younger than third grade often need a parent sitting nearby to help with technology – open links, troubleshoot the computer – and manage materials.
Can you help with homework during tutoring?
For Orton-Gillingham tutoring students, our answer is usually no. Orton-Gillingham is a diagnostic, systematic, sequential, multi-sensory approach to reading instruction. It is counterproductive to work on school assignments that don’t fall within the range of skills we’re teaching.
For example, if a child is working on learning the short vowel sounds in one-syllable words (cup, bond, crimp), it’s not productive for us to study spelling words that follow a bunch of other spelling patterns. Without knowing the patterns that are found in the spelling words, the student has to rely on just their memory to spell them right, and they don’t stick. So although you won’t see an immediate benefit of OG tutoring on spelling tests if your child is significantly below grade level, you can trust that we are building a strong foundation that, with time, will help them to develop those skills.
For students seeking support with reading comprehension and writing, we do work with school assignments when it aligns with what we are working on.
Do you assign homework?
No, we don’t assign homework for our online Orton-Gillingham tutoring students. What we do is send the text the student read during the lesson so you can practice it at home during the week. We’re also happy to recommend text, many available for free online, for independent or family reading.
What should we do at home to practice?
For practice in between Orton-Gillingham tutoring sessions, it’s important that students read text that lines up with what they’ve been practicing in class. We can recommend appropriate texts, many of which are available for free online.
Reading with or to your child is also a great way to support their growing vocabulary and share stories with them that they aren’t ready to read on their own.
The Florida Center for Reading Research also has many free, printable, games and activities that are great tools for practicing early reading skills.
Can you help my child read faster?
Yes, but it takes time. Programs that are specifically for reading fluency usually focus on repeated readings of the same text. Those can help some students, but often low reading fluency occurs when readers aren’t automatic with sounding out the words. And if they aren’t sounding out words automatically, that usually means that there are some phonics skills they haven’t mastered. Often, older students with weak reading and spelling skills are also missing some phonemic awareness skills. Phonemic awareness is the ability to break apart spoken words into their sounds, or to blend together individual spoken sounds. Most kids develop those skills in the early grades, but sometimes readers struggle because they have missed some of these skills.
Building reading fluency effectively means going back and filling gaps in the underlying skills. At the beginning, this can seem slower, but once we build those fluency skills on a firm foundation, students can read anything with confidence!
Can you help my child spell better?
Yes! The same skills (letter-sound relationships, syllables, and prefixes and suffixes) that help students read better help them spell better, too. And our online Orton-Gillingham tutoring includes practice in both reading and spelling.
What’s my child’s reading level?
Well, it’s complicated. I wish I could give you a letter or a number that universally represents what your child can read and understand. That would be so much easier! But unfortunately, it’s not that simple. The main leveling systems used in schools for children and their books are Guided Reading Levels (letters A-Z) and the DRA system (numbers from 2 up to 70). When teachers assign these, they take into account reading accuracy, fluency and comprehension. For a lot of readers, this is a good approximation of what they can read.
For readers who are struggling to decode words, these assessments are nearly meaningless. They tend to be predictable, patterned texts. At the early stages, they are things like “I see the bear. I see the elephant. I see the crocodile.” So really, they’re measuring how well students use the pictures to predict what the page says. Lots of my struggling students hit a wall in second grade (or maybe third) because until they’ve learned all six syllable types and the majority of vowel team sounds, they will frequently be stumped by words in texts at this level. Until they have gotten pretty far in the Orton-Gillingham sequence, it’s very difficult to sync up what they know with a “reading level.” So instead, I recommend decodable texts.
Still have questions?
If you’re still wondering if online Orton-Gillingham tutoring is what your child needs, contact us to find out more. We are always happy to schedule a no-cost, no-obligation trial lesson to see if tutoring with Deep Roots Learning Solutions is the right fit for your child!
