.An individual Orton-Gillingham course costs over $2,000 and associate level training costs $4,000 plus $250 for materials. There are various levels of training and certification that can be purchased. What you get for your money is an expensive, Humpty-Dumptian approach to reading instruction where children are taught a specified list of reading subskills in a predetermined order and in a specified way. the Orton-Gillingham magic ingredient is “multisensory” instruction. This means it uses visual, auditory, and kinesthetic modalities when teaching. In other words, as children are learning, they see things, hear things, and do things.

This is called multimodal instruction. Elementary teachers have been using it for years. But an effective meaning-based approach to reading instruction is even more multimodal in its multimodality. It includes imagination, emotion, and social interaction as well as visual, auditory, and kinesthetic modalities. So effective meaning-based reading instruction would have children see things, hear things, do things, imagine things, emote things, and say things. In this podcast I describe 21 multimodal instructional strategies. And I will not charge you $4,000 plus $250 for materials.