Reading Instruction

St Timothy uses Orton Gillingham strategies in the K - 3 classrooms to teach students letters, sounds, and phonemes. It is a systematic presentation of sounds with a multi-sensory approach that fosters a student’s ability to build words and read, while also supporting their spelling and writing skills.

Our teachers follow a specific scope and sequence to present different concepts in their classrooms. Depending on the grade, students are given one or two sounds/phonemes a week. Many language arts lessons and spelling words are based on those phonemes to reinforce the student’s understanding and use of the sound. They also review red word lists which are words that do not follow the rules and students have to memorize through drill and practice.

Suffixes, prefixes and Latin root words are also explicitly taught to help students with their decoding of complex words and to help draw understanding of a new term based by knowing the meanings of its parts. This aids student understanding of vocabulary and spelling of larger words when unknown words can be broken down into these key parts.

Orton Gillingham is an approach that can also help support struggling readers acquire strong decoding skills. We have had great success using Orton Gillingham methods in our school for the last 10 years.