Margaret Byrd Rawson, a former President of the International Dyslexia Association (IDA), said it well:

“Dyslexic students need a different approach to learning language from that employed in most classrooms. They need to be taught, slowly and thoroughly, the basic elements of their language—the sounds and the letters which represent them—and how to put these together and take them apart. They have to have lots of practice in having their writing hands, eyes, ears, and voices working together for conscious organization and retention of their learning.” Teachers who use this approach help students perceive the speech sounds in words (phonemes) by looking in the mirror when they speak or exaggerating the movements of their mouths.”

We provide Orton Gillingham Tutoring in Metuchen & Edison New Jersey

Project Exceed serves students with a wide range of skills and abilities. We do not begin on a fixed starting point or follow a predetermined scope and sequence. Each student’s program is individualized. While we also have training in the Wilson and Phonics First programs and can support students who are utilizing those programs in their schools, Project Exceed’s main focus is on the Orton-Gillingham (OG) approach. The OG approach allows us to make instructional decisions based on a student’s current skills’ mastery and prescribe next steps based on skills taught and mastered rather than a specific grade level or curriculum point. A tutoring session can involve developing sound/symbol relationships, reading and spelling one-syllable words, composing basic sentences, reading a decodable text, Latin prefixes, reviewing the major spelling rules, outlining an essay, and reading from a classic, authentic text.

The common thread of each program is to address students skills and needs in key areas:

• Phonemic Awareness and Word Attack skills
• Spelling (encoding)
• Vocabulary
• Reading Comprehension
• Reading Fluency
• Grammar/Syntax
• Expository Writing (composition)
• Handwriting and/or Keyboarding

A typical OG lesson will resemble this lesson taught by Susan Nolan:

For more information, visit the Orton Academy website