The Opening Trio
Every session, lesson day or practice day, opens with the same three warm-ups: Short Vowel Posters, Quick Drill Decoding, and the phonemic awareness blocks. About six minutes total. Learn them once and you'll run them on autopilot all year.
Why the same three, every time?
Repetition is the mechanism, not a side effect. A dyslexic brain builds reading pathways through many short, correct reps, and the trio delivers them daily without your child ever having to learn a new routine. By week two, these six minutes run themselves, and your child starts each session with three things they already know how to do. That's a confidence on-ramp, every single session.
The posters: trace, say, exaggerate
The five Short Vowel Posters (ant, egg, inch, ox, up) come first. Your child traces each letter with their learning fingers (pointer and middle finger together) while saying the key word and exaggerating the short vowel sound: /a/nt, /e/gg, /i/nch, /o/x, /u/p. Three times per poster. Seeing, saying, and moving at once is the multisensory core of Orton-Gillingham.
The cards: the sound, not the name
You know Quick Drill Decoding from Module 2. It's the Sound Cards drill. Two reminders that matter most in week one: your child says the sound, not the letter name, and the sound stays clean: /b/, never buh. The stray “uh” sabotages blending later (buh-a-tuh is not bat). And when you reach q, it's always with u: q is a chicken letter, too scared to go anywhere alone.
The blocks: sounds before letters
The Phonemic Awareness Drill is all by ear, no letters. Each sound in a word gets a colored block: pull them down one per sound, tap under each block saying the sounds, then underline the row and say the word fast. Blends get a block per sound (best = 4 blocks); a digraph is one sound, so one block (stash = 4 blocks, with sh sharing one). Repeated sounds reuse the same color: sis is red, blue, red.
Set a 3-minute timer per drill
The Teacher Guide is explicit: you cover whatever fits the window, not the whole list. Early weeks you might get through half the cards. That's correct, not behind.
Watch Sandra run them
Dry-run the trio solo
Before you run it with your child, run it alone: trace the five posters saying the key words, flip ten sound cards saying clean sounds, and block out the word pig with anything handy (coins work). Note the one drill that felt clumsy. That's the demo video to rewatch.
The Tile Mat
Reading turns letters into sounds. Spelling turns sounds back into letters, and that's the half most programs skip. The tile mat is where your child builds words with their hands before a pencil ever gets involved: Find a Sound, then Spelling on the mat.
Find a Sound: ear to hand
You say a sound; your child repeats it, finds the tile, and slides it to the center of the mat. That's the whole drill (Quick Drill Encoding in the Teacher Guide's language). It looks simple, and it's doing serious work: connecting the sound they hear to the letter they'll eventually write, with no handwriting load in the way. If they freeze, ask “What sound are you looking for?” And if they're still stuck, give the key word from the posters (/a/ like ant).
Spelling on the mat: three steps, every word
Say the word. Your child builds it tile by tile, saying each sound as they place it. Then tap under each tile saying the sounds, and underline the whole word with two fingers saying it fast. Build, tap, underline: the same rhythm as the colored blocks, now with real letters. In Lesson 1's list (fat, mat, map, sat, can…), each word is one or two tiles away from the last. Don't tidy the mat between words; watching mat become sat is the lesson.
No tiles on the table?
The Virtual Tile Mat below runs in any browser. Drag the tiles, tap one to hear its sound. It's great for practice reps on the couch, in the car, or at grandma's.
Watch, then try the virtual mat
Build three words on the virtual mat
Open the Virtual Tile Mat and spell cat, sat, sit, saying each sound out loud, tapping, and underlining (the full three-step routine). Feel how little changes between words? Your child will feel it too.
Sorts, Games & Nonsense Words
The drills build speed; the sorts build judgment. Word sorts and picture sorts make your child decide whether each word follows the week's rule. The Memory Match game and nonsense words round out the week. Here's how to run all three, and what to say when your child protests “that's not a real word!”
Running a sort without giving away answers
Each week's sort practices that week's rule: closed syllables, the double letter rule, the sounds of plural s. The method never changes: take a card, ask the rule's questions out loud (“Does it have one vowel? Is it followed by a consonant? Is the vowel short?”), and let your child answer each one before the card lands in a column. After a few cards, drop the scaffolding: just ask “Is this one a closed syllable?” and follow with “Why, or why not?” The why is where the rule moves from your mouth to their head.
Memory Match: the Friday finisher
Friday's checklist ends with Memory Match: pairs of the week's words, face down, winner takes the match. Your child is re-reading the week's words a dozen times and calling it a game. Don't optimize it, don't quiz during it; the win at the end is part of the design. If the week went sideways and Friday is all you've got, do the quick drills and the game, and call it a good week.
Nonsense words: the honest test
Dyslexic kids are often brilliant memorizers and context-guessers, which can hide the fact that decoding isn't happening. A nonsense word like vab or shom can't be memorized or guessed; the only way through it is sounds. That's why every word list includes some. When your child reads one correctly, that's the clearest evidence you'll get all week that the system is working. If they protest, agree with them cheerfully: “Right, it's a made-up word! Can you read it anyway?” There's a whole coaching card for this moment in Kitchen Table Moments.
Watch Sandra run them
Rehearse the nonsense-word line
Say it out loud, twice, like you mean it: “Right, it's a made-up word! Can you read it anyway?” Having the line ready is the difference between a fun moment and a stall. Then write your own version in your own words.
You know every drill. Now preview the concepts.
Module 4 walks you through the four new ideas of curriculum Lessons 1–4, one short preview before each week you teach.
Start Module 4 · Run Lessons 1–4