History Orton-Gillingham was the first teaching approach designed to help struggling readers by explicitly teaching the connections between letters and sounds. In the 1930’s neurologist Dr. Samuel T. Orton and educator, psychologist Anna Gillingham developed the Orton-Gillingham approach to reading instruction for students with "word-blindness," which would later become known as dyslexia. Their approach combined multi-sensory teaching strategies paired with systematic, sequential lessons focused on phonics. Today, Orton-Gillingham is used in many reading programs as an effective way to teach literacy. What Orton-Gillingham is all about... Orton-Gillingham is a highly structured approach that breaks reading and spelling down into smaller skills involving letters and sounds, and then building on these skills over time. It also was the first approach to use multi-sensory teaching strategies to teach reading, which is considered extremely effective for teaching students with dyslexia. This means that educators use sight, hearing, touch, and movement to help students connect and learn the concepts being taught. Cited from Institute of Multi-Sensory Education