My journey to becoming a reading teacher 

It all started when…

I was a full-time stay-at-home mom. Having only one child at the time, I was sitting on the couch while he was napping reading Rudolph Flesch’s Why Johnny Can’t Read. I was a college graduate with a degree in Special Education, and after getting into this book, I can remember the feeling of a light bulb going on! The book illustrated exactly why American schoolchildren from the 1960s on, were reading at a level so much lower than their parents and grandparents. The schools had changed their reading programs! I wondered why I was not taught this in college.

Over the years, much has evolved with schools and their reading programs. They have gone from the look-say method, to the whole language method, to guided reading programs; but one thing has stayed the same. Although phonics is taught in the schools, systematic phonics, which is crucial to understanding the structure of our language, is lacking in most American reading programs. Some children can learn despite the method. Many do not. This is where I found my calling. I started with homeschooling my three children to make sure they did not become “word guessers”. Later, I went on to become a Multisensory Structured Language Educator (MSLE) when I became certified in the Orton-Gillingham method.

Orton-Gillingham is a method of teaching reading and spelling which uses four senses: visual, auditory, kinesthetic, and tactile. Because of this, it teaches to all learning styles. After teaching for forty years, I can honestly say that I never had a student who did not learn using this method!