Our staff care about your child's literacy skills.
We are committed to providing a top quality service in a nurturing environment.
Our teaching program utilises the Orton-Gillingham teaching approach, following a Structured Synthetic Phonics lesson progression. Our teaching approach is Multi-Sensory in nature, incorporating sight, sound, feel and action.
This is the most effective way to teach struggling students to both read and spell.
MEET OUR DIRECTOR
CAROLINE DENNING
She is a lifelong learner and her qualifications include, Certified Dyslexia, Reading and Yoshimoto Orton-Gillingham Specialist, Certified Master Trainer in Yoshimoto Orton-Gillingham for Australia. (Orton Gillingham International, Inc.). Caroline is a NESA Accredited Teacher (Proficient). She has a B. Ed - Primary Education and a Grad. Dip. Ed. - Primary Education. She has a Post Graduate Certificate in Structured Intervention for Dyslexia and Literacy (Dyslexia Action level 7) and a Professional Certificate in Assessment Practice for Dyslexia (Dyslexia Action Level 7).
Caroline has worked for DET NSW for 20 years, including 5 years as a Learning Support Teacher. She is a true word nerd and one of her favourite podcasts is "The History of English". Caroline opened Dyslexia Southern Sydney in 2015 and then Southern Sydney Reading Clinic in 2020 and her team have helped more than 300 children last year. The clinics are now called the Orton-Gillingham Reading Clinic.
We provide structured literacy intervention across, phonology, syllable level and morphology for individuals and small groups.
WHAT IS O-G?
Orton-Gillingham is a structured literacy approach that helps children with reading difficulties due to dyslexia, auditory processing, speech deficits, and other learning differences. Orton-Gillingham is an evidence based reading instruction that is meant as a 1:1 or small group reading intervention program.
Structured: Every lesson in Orton-Gillingham is organised around a consistent set of strategies, activities, and patterns. The student always knows what to expect throughout each lesson. Students easily transition from activity to activity since they are familiar with the routine and this creates an anxiety free environment for both the student and the teacher.
Sequential: Each skill is taught in a logical order or sequence. The student starts out learning simple word patterns (CVC) and then progresses gradually step by step to more difficult and complex ideas including vowel patterns, multisyllabic words, spelling rules, affixes, and morphemes.
Because all the teaching skills are taught from the ground up, the student will never have any reading or spelling gaps in Orton-Gillingham.
Cumulative: Each Orton-Gillingham lesson builds upon itself. The student is taught a skill and doesn’t progress to the next skill until the current lesson is mastered. As students learn new material, they continue to review old material until it is stored in the student’s long term memory.
Explicit: The teacher is at the center of instruction in an Orton-Gillingham lesson. The instructor teaches the student exactly what they need and never assumes or guesses what the student already knows. Orton-Gillingham uses a lot of continuous student-teacher interaction in each lesson.
Multisensory: In an Orton-Gillingham lesson, the teacher uses the student’s sensory pathways: auditory, visual, and tactile.
When learning the vowel ‘a’ for example, the student might first look at a picture of an APPLE, then close their eyes and listen to the sound, then trace the letter in the air while speaking aloud. This combination of listening, looking, and moving around creates a lasting impression for the student.
Systematic Phonics: Orton-Gillingham includes systematic phonics, beginning with the alphabetic principles in the initial stages of reading development and advancing to more complex principles as the students progress. Students learn that words are made up of individual speech sounds, and the letters of written words graphically represent each of these speech sounds.
SAMUEL TORREY ORTON (1879 TO 1948)
A neuropsychiatrist and pathologist, a pioneer in focusing attention on reading failure and related language processing difficulties. He brought together neuroscientific information and principles of remediation.
As early as the 1920s, he had extensively studied children with the kind of language processing difficulties now commonly associated with dyslexia and had formulated a set of teaching principles and practices for such children.
ANNA GILLINGHAM (1878 TO 1963)
A gifted educator and psychologist with a superb mastery of language.
Working with Dr. Orton, she trained teachers and compiled and published instructional materials. Over the last half century the Orton-Gillingham Approach has been the seminal and most influential intervention designed expressly for remediating the language processing problems of children and adults with dyslexia.