Our Approach to Reading Instruction

The Reading Clinic uses an Orton-Gillingham Approach. The Reading Clinic Instructors are trained in the principles of Orton-Gillingham, The Association Method, Discover Reading and utilize The Clinic’s own Yes! Reading Program. This broad base allows us to be flexible yet systematic in our approach with each student. All of these approaches use direct instruction to provide a highly systematic, sequential, multi-sensory program that can focus on the development of reading decoding skills and comprehension.
In particular, we focus on teaching:
- Phonological awareness
- Sound/symbol recognition, (graphophonics)
- Spelling and english spelling rules and conventions
- Morphology
- Fluency
- Vocabulary
- Comprehension

Parents can play a large role in helping to develop phonological awareness skills through games and activities taught at The Reading Clinic and students of this age usually attend the clinic to 5 times per week for 45 minutes.
If students in grades 1 and 2 do not have a solid foundation in pre-reading skills, (such as sounding out words) they will begin to develop poor reading habits, (such as guessing) that will prevent proper reading development. Traditional reading instructional methods quickly overload these children’s ability to learn sound-letter correspondences by giving too many at once and expecting whole words to be learned first in order to read. The Reading Clinic’s highly systematic, multi-sensory approach and use of phonetically controlled texts allow students to experience success at every step of the program.

While early intervention is best, it is never too late for remediation.
The Reading Clinic works to prevent students from falling further and further behind their peers by offering daily one-on-one intensive intervention to “close the gap” as quickly as possible.
Students attend tutoring sessions for 45 minutes per day.