The REED (Reading Education Endowment for Dyslexia) Charitable Foundation is committed to actively pursuing our mission to immediately make meaningful impact for students with dyslexia by hosting affordable Orton-Gillingham training for teachers, professionals and parents, providing scholarships for teachers in Orton-Gillingham training and private Orton-Gillingham tutoring for students; hosting free community education events to provide exceptional content of best practices in dyslexia and general literacy education and facilitate meaningful fellowship for families impacted by dyslexia; and providing social-emotional programming like NoticeAbility that helps students with dyslexia identify their strengths and build self-esteem critical to their long-term success.

According to the International Dyslexia Association, dyslexia is “a specific learning disability that is neurobiological in origin. It is characterized by difficulties with accurate and/or fluent word recognition and by poor spelling and decoding abilities. These difficulties typically result from a deficit in the phonological component of language that is often unexpected in relation to other cognitive abilities and the provision of effective classroom instruction. Secondary consequences may include problems in reading comprehension and reduced reading experience that can impede growth of vocabulary and background knowledge.”

According to the Academy of Orton-Gillingham Practioners and Educators, the Orton-Gillingham Approach (also known as “OG”) is a direct, explicit, multi sensory, structured, sequential, diagnostic and prescriptive way to teach literacy when reading, writing and spelling does not come easily to individuals, such as those with dyslexia. To learn more about OG, please visit the Academy of Orton-Gillingham Practitioners and Educators website.

While dyslexia does create difficulty in learning how to read, write and spell – dyslexia also comes with some incredible strengths. While supporting reading remediation for dyslexic students is extremely important – equally important are identifying and acknowledging a dyslexic child’s strengths. Some commonly recognized dyslexic strengths include, but are not limited to:

• strong memory for stories
• excellent problem solving skills
• tremendous spatial reasoning (three-dimensional thinkers)
• incredibly creative and imaginative
• high levels of empathy
• brilliant conversationalists
• excellent big-picture thinkers
• great at connections between seemingly unrelated things
• excellent abstract thinkers
• gifted at thinking “outside the box”
• strong critical thinkers
• uniquely observant

Common professions of successful dyslexics include: entrepreneurship, innovation, science, technology, sports, music, architecture, construction, design, advertising, culinary arts, marketing, artists, lawyers, film makers, writing, acting, and engineering – just to name a few. Dyslexics make up some of the world’s greatest innovators, entrepreneurs, celebrities and millionaires and billionaires. With the proper academic and emotional support – the sky is truly the limit for dyslexic kiddos.

The International Dyslexia Association explains that Structured Literacy is considered the most effective approach to teach reading, writing and spelling to students who experience unusual difficulty learning to read and spell words, including dyslexic students. The term includes teaching students phoneme awareness (individual speech sounds that make up words), sound-symbol correspondence, patterns and conventions of print, morphology (the meaning of language), syntax (system for ordering words in sentences so meaning is communicated) and semantics (meaning). Because OG is considered a form of Structured Literacy, Structured Literacy also follows the same principles and methods of OG, including: explicit, systematic, cumulative, multi-sensory, diagnostic and responsive instruction.

The National Council on Teacher Quality refers to the science of reading as explicit, systematic instruction that encompasses all five essential components of early reading instruction, which are: (1) phonemic awareness, (2) phonics, (3) fluency, (4) vocabulary and (5) reading comprehension.