I am very excited to announce that next week, I will be traveling to Boca Raton, Florida to attend a 30 hour professional development seminar about the Orton-Gillingham method for reading instruction. This approach was designed to help students that have language processing problems such as dyslexia, however, over the past 80 years it has evolved to help any child that is learning to read.
The class that I will be taking will focus on implementing the five components of an effective reading program: phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary development, fluency, and comprehension strategies. The most exciting part of this program is the hands on nature of the lessons that works to support the reading program that is already in place at our school. The program is designed to implement multi-sensory activities that incorporate auditory, kinesthetic, and visual components. The tools that I will return with, will be flexible enough to fit the needs of all learners, rather than just those who are struggling. These tools include:
- Multi-sensory strategies for reading, writing and spelling
- Syllabication patterns for encoding / decoding
- Reciprocal Teaching for reading comprehension
- Multi-sensory techniques for sight words
- Student assessment techniques
- Guidelines for weekly lesson plans
I am looking forward to all I will learn from this seminar and will be excited to implement this new knowledge when I return on February 10th.