sey053

When I first began my private practice about 20 years ago, my primary focus was remedial reading with Orton Gillingham (OG) methods. With my doctoral training in hand, I continually reviewed reading programs, read books, and went through a number of OG training courses.  Although the suggested materials were purported to be "multisensory," I still found the process, for the most part, dull and boring. In addition, I often had to bribe my students with candy and stickers to read long lists of words and complete tedious drills.  What could I do to make the process fun, exciting, memorable and even more multisensory? Creating Games with Phonics and Orton Gillingham Content I soon began to create card games out of sight word lists as well as board games for the 6 syllable types.  My students loved the games, and their motivation and memory improved dramatically.   I continued to create more games for words beginnings, word ending, rhyming words, syllabicat...

About 20 years ago, when I first began offering students one-to-one Orton Gillingham based reading remediation, I was having to bribe my students to read long lists of words, word parts, and nonsense syllables. My enticements began with candy, moved to stickers, and finally morphed into a well-stocked prize box. This worked, but I found that I was getting my students hooked on external reinforcements, and that what I really wanted was for them to be internally motivated. I wanted to kindle a joy for learning.   How Could I Bring the Fun Factor into my Lessons? I began to look around for game-like activities that could make the learning process fun.  What I found were simple matching activities and bingo-like games, but nothing was addressing the specific syllable and syllabication rules. In addition, writing, inferences, following directions, main ideas/details, and other language based learning struggles, were pretty much all addressed through boring workbook pages.  Cle...