Our Proven Approach Helps Students Find Academic Success

applying a unique blend leveraging the proven approaches from orton-gillingham, structured literacy, and a Multi-sensory TECHNIQUES, we engage children in an environment where they are ready to learn.

Every child’s learning style and energy is unique which is why the Graybill Literacy & Learning Studio was designed to have all of the resources we need to create a dynamic, engaging, and effective learning environment that meets their needs.

One of the approaches we use at the Graybill Literacy & Learning Studio is the The Orton-Gillingham Approach 

This is a direct, explicit, multi-sensory, structured, sequential, diagnostic, and prescriptive way to teach literacy. After years of experience and success with this approach in the classroom setting, I know it can be a powerful tool of exceptional breadth, depth, and flexibility to help your student.

What it looks like at Graybill Literacy & Learning Studio

I apply the Orton-Gillingham approach throughout all of my activities and lessons with students. This includes incorporating multi-sensory instruction which is a way of teaching that engages more than one sense at a time. Using sight, hearing, movement, and touch gives kids more than one way to connect with what they are learning. Some of my favorite techniques include writing in sand, story sticks, air writing, and engaging in a physical activity during the learning process.

The Orton-Gillingham Approach 

The Orton-Gillingham Approach always is focused upon the learning needs of the individual student. At Graybill Literacy & Learning Studio, we design lessons and materials to work with students at the level they present by pacing instruction and the introduction of new materials to their individual strengths and weaknesses.

What Orton-Gillingham is all about

Orton-Gillingham is a highly structured approach that breaks reading and spelling down into smaller skills involving letters and sounds, and then building on these skills over time. It was the first approach to use multi-sensory teaching strategies to teach reading, which is considered extremely effective for teaching students with dyslexia. This means that educators use sight, hearing, touch, and movement to help students connect and learn the concepts being taught.

History of Orton-Gillingham

Orton-Gillingham was the first teaching approach designed to help struggling readers by explicitly teaching the connections between letters and sounds. In the 1930’s neurologist Dr. Samuel T. Orton and educator, psychologist Anna Gillingham developed the Orton-Gillingham approach to reading instruction for students with "word-blindness," which would later become known as dyslexia. Their approach combined multi-sensory teaching strategies paired with systematic, sequential lessons focused on phonics.

Today, Orton-Gillingham is used in many reading programs as an effective way to teach literacy. We are proud to apply the approach to help our students at the Graybill Literacy & Learning Studio.