What I Learned Looking for an Orton Gillingham Tutor for My 3rd Grader
I’m folding laundry at the kitchen table last October, my third grader Lila shoves her reading worksheet across the table so hard a half-empty apple juice box tips, soaking the cuff of my sweatshirt. “I’m not doing it,” she says, crossing her arms. “I’m stupid. I don’t want another reading teacher.” The worksheet has “sound out the words” printed at the top, all the blanks empty. We’d already done 12 weeks of the school’s small-group reading intervention, and it wasn’t sticking. Her dyslexia screening had come back mild, but consistent—she still mixed up b and d, stumbled over three-letter words she’d sounded out correctly the week before, and hid her reading log in the back of her backpack every Monday. Everyone I talked to said Orton Gillingham was the approach we needed, so I started looking.
I started with the obvious, typing “Orton Gillingham tutor near me” into Google after Lila went to bed. The first page of results was all big national tutoring services, with shiny websites and price tags starting at $90 an hour, going up to $150 for a certified practitioner. I stared at the screen, my chest tight. My husband and I had just paid for a new water heater, and dropping that kind of money every week felt impossible. I’d already heard that OG was the gold standard for dyslexia, but I had no idea how to sort out who was actually qualified, vs. who just added “Orton Gillingham experienced” to their tutoring bio.
I texted my neighbor down the street, whose 10-year-old also has dyslexia, and she told me to check our local parent support group on Facebook. I posted a quick question asking for recommendations, and had seven replies within 45 minutes. That’s where I learned the first big lesson: anyone can say they do OG. It’s an approach to teaching reading, not a trademarked program, so there’s nothing stopping someone from taking a one-hour online workshop and adding it to their website.
I interviewed three tutors before I found the right one. The first was a local elementary teacher who tutored after school, and she told me she’d taken a 6-hour summer course on OG. When I asked how she’d sequence lessons for a kid who still mixes up short vowel sounds but gets most long vowel rules, she said she just followed the workbook that came with the course. That was a no for me—my kid’s not a workbook page, so I moved on. The second was a senior special ed student at the local college, who’d done a 10-hour OG certification prep course, charged $40 an hour. When I asked how she worked with kids who get frustrated after 15 minutes of sounding out words, she said she’d just push them a little because practice makes perfect. That didn’t fit either; Lila shuts down completely if she feels pushed.
The third was Ms. Rita, a retired special ed teacher who’d taught for 28 years in our district’s dyslexia program. She commented on my post saying she was taking two new students, charged $50 an hour, and met families at the downtown public library because she didn’t want to tutor out of her house anymore. We met for a 15-minute coffee before we started, and she pulled out her certification from the Academy of Orton Gillingham Practitioners and Educators, showed me her log of training hours—she’d done over 100 hours of supervised training when she got certified, and did continuing ed every year. That’s the second thing I learned: when you’re looking, ask for specific training hours. Any good OG tutor will have at least 60 hours of formal, structured training, plus supervised practice with a more experienced tutor. If they can’t tell you that number, keep looking.
Ms. Rita keeps butter mints in her canvas tote, and always starts our sessions with five minutes of playing a word game with magnetic letters before we get into lesson work. That’s the multi-sensory part of OG I’d read about, but I didn’t get how it worked until I saw it: she has Lila move the letters around as she says the sound out loud, taps each sound on her palm to feel the sequence. When Lila mixes up b and d, Ms. Rita doesn’t just correct her—she has her put her hand on her throat to feel the sound pop, and says “see, this one is like a bat, hits first” to remind her the stick is on the left. It sounds small, but it’s stuck better than any flashcard we’ve ever used.
I also learned that you don’t have to pay full price if you can’t afford it. Ms. Rita told me that since Lila has a documented dyslexia diagnosis on her IEP, we could ask the school district to cover part of the cost of private tutoring. I filled out the paperwork, thinking it would get denied, and we ended up getting half our sessions covered through the district’s intervention support fund. I’d had no idea that was an option, and it’s made all the difference for our budget. If your kid has an IEP, it’s worth asking your special ed coordinator about it.
We’ve been meeting with Ms. Rita for six months now. Lila still has bad weeks—last week she forgot every suffix rule we’d worked on the month before, and left the session frustrated. Ms. Rita just texted me afterwards saying it’s normal, kids hit plateaus, and we’d back off and work on silly rhyming games next week. She didn’t panic, and that made me not panic either. I still worry sometimes about next year, when the reading assignments get longer and harder, and what we’ll do when Ms. Rita decides she doesn’t want to tutor anymore. I spent three weeks stressing about finding the “perfect” tutor, thinking I’d have to spend all our extra money to get someone good. Turns out the best fit for us was a retired teacher who just wanted to keep working with kids, who charges half what the big companies do, and meets us at the library around her grandkids’ soccer schedule. It’s not fancy, and it’s not perfect, but it’s working.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » What I Learned Looking for an Orton Gillingham Tutor for My 3rd Grader