Have you ever wondered what SOR-aligned phonics instruction looks like? Click here to keep reading & learn more!

Now, if you have been working with us for a while, you’ll know that we LOVE teaching with key images and phrases to help anchor skills for a student. For au/aw, we use the phrase “Yawn, I have to do the laundry.” This helps our struggling readers and spellers remember the rule. Keep reading for more tips, tricks and activities surrounding the au/aw vowel team.

OU has two sounds. To help our students remember these sounds, we use the key phrase “Trout Soup” because it can say /ow/ like in trout and /oo/ like in soup. The visual of fish soup is one the students don’t forget very easily! Keep reading for more tips, tricks and vowel team activities!

OO can be a tricky vowel team because it has two sounds. Click through to read about our tips & tricks for teaching this vowel team!

We use both “oi” and “oy” to make the /oi/ sound (think of the words “boy” and “foil”). When that sound comes in the middle of a word, we use “oi.” If it comes at the end of the word, we will use “oy.” Keep reading to learn more about how we teach our students all about this vowel team!

Vowel teams can be tricky for students, but we have found that teaching them in this way has made a massive difference. Keep reading for ideas for teaching the OA/OE vowel teams!

Okay everyone, we’ve got some heavy stuff for you this Friday. But here’s the thing we are super amped up about it right now because we are at the International Dyslexia Association National Conference and just had the opportunity to present this information about our favorite thing since sliced bread.

So this can be one of the most challenging things we face as reading interventionists - what activities do I pull to target specific weaknesses for my struggling readers? And how can I do that without spending a TON of extra time that I don’t really have?

We all want the very best for our students, it’s our mission and our goal to be providing the best possible instruction to help completely eliminate reading and spelling gaps.

Welcome to week 4 in our series of The Reading & Spelling Rules That Nobody Taught You. In this post, we are going to talk about the fourth syllable type we teach to our students, Open Syllables.

The Open Syllable is the opposite of a Closed Syllable. In an open syllable, you have a vowel left alone at the end of the syllable. Our students like to remember that when nothing is behind the vowel, it can go for a looooong run and say its loooooong sound.

So we’ve been talking all about the reading and spelling rules that were brand new to us when we began to learn about Structured Literacy and the “science” behind the English language. Today, we are going to talk a little about the “Bossy-R” or the R-controlled syllable type. This one is a challenge!!!

The second syllable type we teach students is our VCE (Vowel Consonant E) Syllable Type. Perhaps, if I told you it was also called the Magic E Syllable, it would sound familiar? Click through to read about VCE syllables and all of the rules we teach within this syllable type!

Closed Syllables are the first of the syllable types that we teach to our students. Within this syllable type we cover the -ck, FLOSS, -tch, and -dge phonograms as well as the 1-1-1 doubling rule. Do you know all of these rules? Click through to find out!

One of the best ways we can skyrocket student success in literacy is by setting the intention to do so. So obviously, if we want students to improve their literacy ability we need to recognize that they need to improve their literacy ability...

After that, the #1 thing you can do to improve a student's literacy ability is to set specific and measurable goals.

Students with expressive/receptive language disorders face a number of challenges in school. It is estimated that 1 in 20 students have some type of language disorder. These students are often working overtime to cope with their challenges and their struggle can go undetected or be misunderstood.

Language skills are at the heart of early literacy development and a key component to your child’s success in school.

Unlock the effectiveness of Orton-Gillingham (OG) instruction! Discover the key components—phonology, sound-symbol association, syllable instruction, morphology, syntax, and semantics—that make OG a personalized and powerful approach for students with reading disorders.