Orton Gillingham working in your classrom!

Recently I was lucky enough to go to a week long conference on the Orton-Gillingham techniques of teaching reading. If you have never heard of this program, it is worth it to look it up! There is a lot of information for teachers in K-3, but since my students are in special education I find I can use some of the techniques in my classroom.
I am just starting to implement these techniques in my room this year. I have done a lot of "googling" to try and find ideas for games, center work, and activities that were not too young for 5th grade. I started to use ideas from other games and younger grades to make my own encoding and decoding games. Here are some the things I have going on in my room right now, and I've been tweaking things constantly!

This game is to reinforce the "qu" sound and word recognition. This game is played just like Old Maid except no one wants to be the queen in this game. I typed up my rules sheet and used index cards that were cut in half. My one word of advice is to use colored index cards though, I learned the hard way that students are very good at finding ways to "cheat". The kids love this game and had awesome scores on their weekly test.

The next game I created is called CVC Go Fish and this is a review game after we completed all the sounds of the alphabet. This helped student practice their "finger-tapping" and blending skills nicely. This game was also made on index cards (dollar store color pack of 100!) Played just like go fish each player gets 7 cards and they go back and forth requesting a word from one another. First person to run out of cards ends the game, person with the most matches wins! I still need to make a rules sheet for this one! This was a really good review game and allowed for extra practice of their decoding skills. Again, awesome scores on their test! :-)

Next we moved into compound words and what better than compound word memory! Pretty nice game, except I discovered a little too late that having them numbered would have been better for students who do not have the vocabulary to know when they have made a compound word. I since have updated this to include corresponding numbers on each pair. They had a lot of fun with this game also.

I have a few more games, but will try to post more of them a little later. Orton Gillingham is VERY new to me, but I'm trying to find ways to incorporate it during my reading centers (Daily 5ish). Any advice or thoughts would be appreciated! :-)

 

UPDATE: so glad people are using O-G! I have a teachers-pay-teachers store that has some of my words sorts and other items. I am trying to find some time to add more of what I have.

https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/My-Products

ENJOY!!

Strategy Bookmark

I have seen some really neat reading strategy bookmarks, but many of them were too young for my students. I finally decided to adapt the bookmark for my students. I plan on printing it on cardstock and giving them to students during guided reading, when I can go over it with the students. I think it turned out pretty nice, but if there are glitches I will upload my changes too. Hope you are enjoying some of these tools!

I will post a link to the documet as soon as I can get it to work correctly. Okay, so this what I have. I'd be happy to email you the document if you'd like to change something. Just comment/message me :-)

UPDATE: I know there has been lots of interest in the strategy bookmark, I now have it posted for FREE on my teacherspayteachers account. If you have never used teacherspayteachers.com it is very easy and FREE. 

Here is the link to my teachers pay teachers account: http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Strategy-Book-Marks-330433

The Key to Accommodations... Finally!

I find that one of the hardest things to explain as a special educator is how important accommodations are. Obviously accommodations are part of a student's individualized education plan (IEP) and must be followed, but this doesn't mean we follow them correctly! I've had many teachers create "short cuts" for accommodations that do not provide the same support for the students. After awhile I decided that a document was needed to help general education teachers and special education teachers understand what accommodations are out there and why we give them. This would be very helpful when making lessons plans or writing and IEP. I continue to add onto it as I have students with new disabilities, but my group has been so diverse that I have to say I might not be adding to this list for awhile. :-) Hope this helps anyone who has ever wished for something like this!

Accommodation Key Document