Orton-Gillingham Red Words

Well, hello!  It's been quite some time since I've been here on this ol' blog.  Life happens, well mainly a 3 year old happens, and I've been too busy being a mom and spare time has been spent in other ways besides being creative in the education field.  Most of my creativity lately has been spent on my t-shirt design business, but I've had the itch to get back to my passion of creating teaching products.

This past summer my school decided to implement Phonics First in all Kindergarten-3rd Grade literacy classrooms.

Phonics First, an Orton-Gillingham program, brings beginning level multi sensory instruction into the classroom.  Phonics First transforms beginning, struggling, and dyslexic readers into skilled readers through an effective, fun, multi-sensory approach to reading and spelling (https://brainspring.com/which-course/).

So, one major component of Phonics First is "red words".  Red words are simply Orton-Gillingham's version of non-decodable, sight words.  The students do different activities with these words using a red crayon.  During training of the program we received lists of these words, but no actual word cards to use, so, naturally I created some!

These cards can be used to display the words, use on a word wall, use in small group....there are many ways you can use these cards.  If you are trained in the program then you will use these cards to introduce the words to the student and begin the load/arm tap procedure.

Click on any image above to find the full card collection.

We are nine weeks in on using this program and I've already seen incredible results!

Phonics First includes alphabetic and phonological awareness strategies, basic phonetic concepts for decoding and encoding, and three part drill for structured review, tactile/kinesthetic spelling techniques for phonetic and non-phonetic words, oral reading/connected text fluency, and introductory syllabication for multisyllabic words.