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Bonita Lee's credentialsCertification:
Bonita Lee is a highly experienced teacher with thirty-eight years in the Westport public schools. Over that time her variety of teaching assignments gave her experience teaching children with a wide range of disabilities and levels. During her first fifteen years at the elementary school level Bonita was a special education teacher and resource teacher. Bonita acquired a high degree of skill teaching basic reading and math skills to give students a solid academic foundation. She primarily used the Orton-Gillingham Reading Program for reading instruction. Bonita then transferred to a middle school still working as a special education teacher where she spent the next eighteen years. She worked with children to fill in gaps in basic skills, taught study skills, and supported regular education curriculum. Also during this time she taught self-contained English and Math classes to grades 6, 7, and 8. She primarily used the Wilson Reading Program for reading instruction. During the last five years of her career, she taught an Integrated Program at a middle school . This involved teaching self-contained classes in reading decoding, reading comprehension, writing, math, social studies and science to children with autism, intellectual disabilities, and multiple disabilities. During this time, she designed several original programs which proved to be highly effective with this population of children. Throughout her career she performed educational evaluations, and formulated IEP’S and designed behavior plans.
The Orton-Gillingham Multisensory Method was developed in the early 1930's by Anna Gillingham and a group of master teachers. Dr. Samuel Orton assigned Anna's group the task of designing a whole new way of teaching the phonemic structure of our written language to people with dyslexia. The goal was to create a sequential system that builds on itself in an almost 3-dimensional way. It must show how sounds and letters are related and how they act in words; it must also show how to attack a word and break it into smaller pieces. And it must be a multi-sensory approach, as dyslexic people learn best by involving all of their senses: visual, auditory, tactile, and kinesthetic. The Orton-Gillingham Multisensory Method is different from other reading methods in two ways: what is taught, and how it is taught. What is taught: * Phonemic Awareness is the first step. You must teach someone how to listen to a single word or syllable and break it into individual phonemes. They also have to be able to take individual sounds and blend them into a word, change sounds, delete sounds, and compare sounds -- all in their head. These skills are easiest to learn before someone brings in printed letters. * Phoneme/Grapheme Correspondence is the next step. Here you teach which sounds are represented by which letter(s), and how to blend those letters into single-syllable words. * The Six Types of Syllables that compose English words are taught next. If students know what type of syllable they're looking at, they'll know what sound the vowel will make. Conversely, when they hear a vowel sound, they'll know how the syllable must be spelled to make that sound. * Probabilities and Rules are then taught. The English language provides several ways to spell the same sounds. For example, the sound /SHUN/ can be spelled either TION, SION, or CION. The sound of /J/ at the end of a word can be spelled GE or DGE. Dyslexic students need to be taught these rules and probabilities. * Roots and Affixes, as well as Morphology are then taught to expand a student's vocabulary and ability to comprehend (and spell) unfamiliar words. For instance, once a student has been taught that the Latin root TRACT means pull, and a student knows the various Latin affixes, the student can figure out that retract means pull again, contract means pull together, subtract means pull away (or pull under), while tractor means a machine that pulls. * Simultaneous Multisensory Instruction: research has shown that dyslexic people who use all of their senses when they learn (visual, auditory, tactile, and kinesthetic) are better able to store and retrieve the information. So a beginning dyslexic student might see the letter A, say its name and sound, and write it in the air -- all at the same time. * Intense Instruction with Ample Practice: instruction for dyslexic students must be much more intense, and offer much more practice, than for regular readers. * Direct, Explicit Instruction: dyslexic students do not intuit anything about written language. So, you must teach them, directly and explicitly, each and every rule that governs our written words. And you must teach one rule at a time, and practice it until it is stable in both reading and spelling, before introducing a new rule. * Systematic and Cumulative: by the time most dyslexic students are identified, they are usually quite confused about our written language. So you must go back to the very beginning and create a solid foundation with no holes. You must teach the logic behind our language by presenting one rule at a time and practicing it until the student can automatically and fluently apply that rule both when reading and spelling. You must continue to weave previously learned rules into current lessons to keep them fresh and solid. The system must make logical sense to our students, from the first lesson through the last one. * Synthetic and Analytic: dyslexic students must be taught both how to take the individual letters or sounds and put them together to form a word (synthetic), as well as how to look at a long word and break it into smaller pieces (analytic). Both synthetic and analytic phonics must be taught all the time. * Diagnostic Teaching: the teacher must continuously assess their student's understanding of, and ability to apply, the rules. The teacher must ensure the student isn't simply recognizing a pattern and blindly applying it. And when confusion of a previously-taught rule is discovered, it must be retaught. Research supports the Orton-Gillingham approach If your child has an I.E.P., this description of a reading program should be on the I.E.P.:"Independent scientific, replicated research supports the use of a reading and spelling system that is simultaneously multisensory, systematic, and cumulative with direct and explicit instruction in both synthetic and analytic phonics with intense practice." Return to Top The Wilson Reading System is a research-based reading and writing program designed for students (grades 2-12 and adults) who have difficulty with decoding (reading) and encoding (spelling). It is a complete curriculum that has 12 steps, beginning with phoneme segmentation. Its main goal is to teach students language and word structure through a carefully planned program. The program was developed in Massachusetts in the 1980s by Barbara A. Wilson, based on knowledge gained from working with adults with dyslexia using Orton-Gillingham methodology at Massachusetts General Hospital's Language Disorders Unit, and with students in an after-school reading clinic founded with her husband, Ed Wilson. The Wilson Reading System, published in 1989, is now commonly used in various settings throughout the United States and several other countries. Background Although initially designed for older individuals with dyslexia, Wilson Reading System is now appropriate for students with decoding or word-level deficits. It provides an organized, sequential system with extensive controlled text to help teachers implement a multisensory structured language program. WRS is also useful for students who can’t read or write English but are able to speak and understand. It is extensively used with older individuals and middle school students. One of the unique characteristics of the Wilson Reading System is that it was designed for students beyond grade 2. Students who are enrolled in WRS experience a planned, integrated procedure and learn methodically. The teaching plan is based on continual evaluation of the students’ needs. WRS instruction is multisensory, organized and cumulative. The WRS uses an exceptional sound tapping system at the beginning of the program to help students learn to distinguish the speech sounds in a word. Wilson students are not overwhelmed with the burden of learning the rules of the language but rather focus on the application of the rules. Comprehension and fluency are two important components of the program. |
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For more Information e-mail bonita@bonitalee.com or call (203) 767-1859 |
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