What Is the Orton-Gillingham Approach? A Parent's Guide

The Orton-Gillingham approach is a structured, multisensory way of teaching reading and spelling, developed specifically for children with dyslexia. Instead of expecting children to absorb reading naturally, it teaches the English language explicitly and systematically, one skill at a time, using sight, sound, and movement together. It is the foundation of most evidence-based dyslexia intervention used around the world today.

Where does Orton-Gillingham come from?

The approach is named after neuropsychiatrist Dr. Samuel Orton, who studied why intelligent children struggled to read in the 1920s, and educator Anna Gillingham, who, with her colleague Bessie Stillman, turned his research into a teachable method; their first manual was published in 1935. Nearly a century of refinement later, its core insight still holds: children with dyslexia can absolutely learn to read. They just need the code of written English taught to them directly, rather than left for them to infer. Most of the structured literacy programmes you may have heard of, such as Wilson, Barton and Slingerland, are built on Orton-Gillingham principles.

What makes it different from regular tuition?

Most tuition re-teaches schoolwork: the same content, delivered again, a little slower. Orton-Gillingham goes back to the foundations of how written English works and rebuilds them properly.

The difference shows up in how every single lesson is built. Orton-Gillingham is an approach, not a brand or a boxed product: a set of teaching principles that practitioners around the world agree on. Strip away the packaging, and genuine Orton-Gillingham teaching always has seven hallmarks.

Orton-Gillingham does not re-teach schoolwork. It rebuilds the foundations of written English, one mastered step at a time.

What are the seven hallmarks of the Orton-Gillingham approach?

A programme missing any of these may borrow the name, but it is not the real thing.

• Multisensory. The child sees a letter pattern, says its sound, hears it in words, and writes it, often within the same activity. Working through several senses at once builds stronger, more durable memory than teaching through any one channel alone.
• Sequential. Skills are taught in a deliberate, logical order, from simple to complex. New learning always connects to something the child already knows, which is how it sticks.
• Incremental. The steps between lessons are small, and nothing is skipped. Picture a staircase with no missing steps: each one is climbable, which is why children who have failed with other methods can succeed here.
• Cumulative. Every session reviews earlier material before adding anything new. Nothing is taught once and dropped; skills are revisited until they are automatic.
• Individualised. Anna Gillingham’s advice to teachers still sets the pace: “Go as fast as you can, but as slow as you must.” The teacher assesses continuously, and each lesson is built from what the previous one revealed. The programme follows the child, not a fixed syllabus.
• Phonogram-based. English has 26 letters, about 44 speech sounds, and hundreds of ways to spell them. Orton-Gillingham teaches phonograms, the letters and letter groups that represent sounds (sh in ship, oa in boat), together with the rules that cover most English words, so reading and spelling stop being guesswork.
• Explicit. Nothing is assumed and nothing is left for the child to infer. Every sound-letter relationship, spelling rule, and syllable pattern is taught directly and clearly.

Who does it help?

Orton-Gillingham was designed for children with dyslexia, but it helps any child who struggles with reading and spelling: children who guess at words, read fluently but spell poorly, or avoid reading altogether. Because it starts from each child’s actual skill level, it works whether the gaps are small or significant.

What does an Orton-Gillingham session look like?

A typical 1:1 session moves through short, connected activities, each a few minutes long, and every one of them chosen for that one child based on what the previous session showed. Here is the shape of a 45-minute session in my own practice.

We open with a card drill. I show letter and letter-pattern cards, and the child gives each sound from memory. It takes three minutes and warms up every pathway the rest of the session will use. Then the drill reverses: I say a sound, and the child repeats it and writes the letters that spell it, saying them aloud as she writes. Sight, sound and movement, all working on the same link.

Next comes blending, pushing individual sounds together into words, followed by the teaching point of the day: perhaps a new letter pattern, perhaps a spelling rule, introduced concretely and practised immediately in words the child can already handle. Then the child reads words, phrases and a short passage built only from patterns she has been taught. Nothing on the page is beyond her. We finish with dictation, from sounds to words to full sentences, and a few minutes of connected reading, so the session always ends on success.

Children usually find the sessions surprisingly enjoyable, which surprises parents more than anything else. The work is achievable by design, the activities change every few minutes, and success builds motivation. A child who has spent years failing at print discovers, sometimes within the first month, that she can read every word on the page in front of her.

How do I know it is working?

Progress arrives in a reliable order. Attitude moves first: less resistance before sessions, more willingness to pick up a book, fewer tears over homework. Accuracy comes next, on the patterns that have been taught, and you will hear it in slower but correct sounding-out where there used to be guessing. Then the skills start showing up outside the lesson, in school readers and spelling tests. Spelling is usually the last thing to settle, and that is normal.

Because the approach is diagnostic, mastery is checked continuously. If the child has not mastered something, it is retaught a different way until she has. The child is never blamed for a lesson that did not land; the lesson is redesigned.

How long does it take to see results?

Most families see early changes within the first few weeks: better confidence, more willingness to try, stronger phonics. Meaningful, lasting change takes longer. Programmes typically run 6 to 18 months, depending on the child’s starting point. The pace is set by mastery, not by a calendar. For the full picture of what this teaching involves, step by step, see how to teach a child with dyslexia to read.

How do you choose an Orton-Gillingham teacher?

Because “Orton-Gillingham” is an approach rather than a brand, no agency controls the label, and anyone can put it on a website. The seven hallmarks above are your checklist, and a few direct questions separate trained practitioners from tuition with new packaging.

Start with training. Ask what course the teacher completed, and how many one-to-one intervention hours sit behind it. Training is not all equal: independent bodies such as IMSLEC (the International Multisensory Structured Language Education Council) accredit multisensory structured language courses, and the deeper ones are accredited at the Therapy level, which asks for substantially more coursework and supervised teaching practice than a short certificate. My own training is in Sounds in Syllables, a multisensory structured language therapy programme; the full list of my credentials is on the about page.

Then ask about the teaching itself. Are sessions truly 1:1? How is progress measured? Is the reading material decodable, meaning built only from patterns the child has been taught? Is spelling taught alongside reading? In a genuine Orton-Gillingham programme it always is.

Be careful with anyone promising a fix in weeks. Rebuilding a child’s literacy foundation is steady work, and honest practitioners say so. A good specialist will also want to look before teaching: a short informal assessment of reading and spelling (at Flourishing Kids, the Reading & Spelling Snapshot) shows where the gaps begin and what the first months of the programme should contain.

Frequently asked questions

Is Orton-Gillingham only for children with a dyslexia diagnosis?

No. A formal diagnosis is not required. The approach helps any child with foundational gaps in reading or spelling, and because assessment happens continuously, it adapts to whatever the underlying difficulty turns out to be.

Does Orton-Gillingham work online?

Yes. With a trained teacher, 1:1 online sessions preserve everything that matters: explicit teaching, multisensory activities, and continuous assessment. At Flourishing Kids, families across India, the UAE, Oman, Singapore, Australia and the US learn this way every week.

How is this different from phonics at school?

School phonics is taught to a whole class at one pace, and moves on whether or not every child has mastered the material. Orton-Gillingham is taught 1:1, at the child’s pace, with every gap identified and filled before moving forward.

How many sessions a week does Orton-Gillingham need?

Most programmes run 3 to 4 short sessions a week. Because the approach is cumulative, frequent sessions keep review close together, so new skills become automatic instead of fading between lessons. At Flourishing Kids, sessions are 45 to 60 minutes, 3 to 4 times a week.

Is Orton-Gillingham a programme I can buy?

No. It is an approach: a set of principles a trained teacher applies to one child at a time. Packaged programmes built on those principles exist, but the teacher’s training and the 1:1 diagnostic teaching are what do the work, not a box of materials.

Dr. V.S. Gayathri is a Dyslexia Therapist, an Orton-Gillingham trained literacy specialist, and the founder of Flourishing Kids. She has delivered over 4,000 hours of one-to-one reading and spelling intervention, helping children across multiple countries build stronger literacy skills. If you are wondering whether this approach would suit your child, get in touch for a free 15-minute conversation.