"What Do You Actually Do?" A Look Inside the Think-Top Educational Institute's Reading Clinic
Updated: Aug 30
Some parents come to me already frustrated and skeptical, having previously paid for lessons that did not work, or delivered way under what was sold. Reading intervention is not cheap, so I understand parents need to ensure they are getting value for their money. Let's take a look inside Think-Top Educational Institute's Orton-Gillingham Reading Clinic. We'll look at what reading actually is, why some children struggle with reading, what Orton-Gillingham really means, and what a session at Think-Top Educational Institute looks like from the inside.
What Is Reading?
Reading is not one skill. It involves multiple processes in the brain working together, at the same time, to get to a point of understanding the meaning of the random squiggles on a page. It is not a natural habit one develops. Each stage of the process must be taught in order for the skill to consolidate: hearing and manipulating the sounds of words, knowing letters and letter patterns and what they mean and sound like, blending those patterns into words, reading connected text fast enough that meaning is not lost, and finally, comprehension, the actual point of the whole exercise. We all read to understand.
A child struggling with reading is hardly ever struggling with only one of these areas. When one of these skills is impaired or untaught, the student must compensate for that in other areas. If a child cannot break a spoken word into its individual sounds, they cannot spell it. A child who has not made the letter patterns automatic is going to have to sound out every single word letter by letter. This uses so much mental energy that there is none left for understanding.
The Reading Gap Our Schools Cannot Close
In Trinidad, like most places, our classrooms are governed by set curricula and timetables. Most of our government schools have overcrowded classrooms of thirty-plus students and only one teacher. A Standard 3 class is expected to be reading at a Standard 3 level, and the curriculum keeps moving whether every child is ready or not. Even the most dedicated of teachers does not have the hours in the day to sit with one child and rebuild a missing foundational skill from scratch, especially not a skill as specific and time-consuming as phoneme segmentation or automatic phonogram recall, while the other twenty-nine sit waiting. Intensive remediation of this kind is extremely difficult to deliver within ordinary whole-class instruction. It requires one-on-one attention under the trained eye of someone who understands whether the child does not know the sound, or knows it but cannot retrieve it quickly enough, and what to do to help. It requires a plan that changes every session, based on what that specific child needs next. To fix these issues, we use the Orton-Gillingham Approach.
What Is the Orton-Gillingham Approach?
It is an approach to reading intervention that breaks the skills of reading down into small, bite-sized pieces to make it easier for students. It ranges from something as simple as phonemic awareness, hearing sounds, all the way to sentence writing. It includes phonics, but it is not a phonics programme.
It is structured and sequential. Nothing is taught in a random order. Every taught skill or sound is built on top of the last one, after a child shows competence in that skill. We review previously taught skills and progress according to readiness. This means a child is never asked to do something their foundation cannot support.
It is multisensory. A child sees the letter, hears it, says the sound, re-reads it, and writes it or builds it with manipulatives while saying it again, usually all at once. This builds a stronger, more durable connection between sound and symbol.
It is diagnostic and prescriptive. This is the clinical part. Sessions are not scripted, and they do not follow a fixed syllabus for every child. Each child completes a thorough Orton-Gillingham-based diagnostic, engineered in-house, at the start of the programme. We test phonological and phonemic awareness, including sound manipulation, then phonics and spelling, word recognition, reading fluency, and both reading and listening comprehension. The child's plan is built specifically on the skills they came in already knowing, and what they still need. As they learn, the plan changes with every session, specific to them. So two children working on the same pattern may be doing very different things in the room, depending on what each of them particularly needs. It is like going to a good doctor. They check you, see what is wrong based on your symptoms, and prescribe medicine or practice specific to you.
This does not mean OG is a magic fix. It takes time, patience, keen observation, analysis, and reporting. If a child does not respond to a programme, there may be other issues underlying it: an auditory processing difficulty, a working memory issue, something outside the reading system entirely. Being able to spot these things, and do something about them, is different from just working through a phonics workbook page by page.
Who Needs Reading Help?
Many parents assume OG intervention is only for children who cannot read at all. That is not true. Any learner who struggles with any part of literacy can benefit, and the profile looks different for every child.
I have assessed children who could sound out completely invented, made up words with real accuracy the moment the task asked them to use phonics, but who could not read those exact same sound patterns in a real word on the page. The decoding skill was there. Guessing at word shapes from memory was already the automatic habit.
How Do I Know If My Child Needs a Reading Assessment?
Parents often know something is wrong long before they know what to call it. You may notice that your child:
guesses words instead of reading through them
reads the same word correctly on one page and incorrectly on the next
struggles to spell words they can say easily
avoids reading aloud
reads very slowly or word by word
has difficulty remembering letter sounds or common spelling patterns
understands a story when it is read aloud but struggles to understand the same material when reading independently
has received extra lessons but continues to struggle
None of these, by itself, tells us exactly what is wrong. That is what assessment is for. We need to find out which part of the reading process is causing the difficulty. You can start a check yourself here or book a reading diagnostic.
What Happens in an Orton-Gillingham Reading Session?
"We do Orton-Gillingham" does not say much to someone on the outside of the practice. So here it is, plainly, in the order we run it every time, though what fills each step changes from child to child.
A phonological awareness warm-up, done aloud, no print yet, just sounds: clapping out syllables, producing a rhyme, blending or pulling apart sounds by ear.
A review of previously taught phonograms, through auditory and visual drills, timed on purpose, because automatic recall is the goal, not slow figuring-out.
Introduction of one new concept, built directly on what came before, taught through multiple senses at once: the child sees it, says it, hears it, and writes, traces, or builds it.
Guided reading practice applying that concept, where real error analysis happens in the moment. A child guessing from a word's shape and a child dropping a sound entirely are telling us two different things, and get corrected two different ways.
Spelling and dictation, to encode the same pattern in writing, since reading a pattern and writing it are not the same skill, and a child can be strong in one and shaky in the other.
Connected text work, using only decodable text, timed for words read correctly per minute and checked for accuracy against the child's own last session.
Every response in every step above is timed, tracked, and analysed before the next session is planned. We know exactly which phonograms are mastered, which are being practised, and which have not yet been introduced. We know which sounds a child can hear but not yet read, and which they can read but not yet spell, because those are three different levels of knowing a sound, not one. No session time is spent re-teaching something already secure, and nothing is rushed past before it is ready.
At the end of every block of sessions, we reassess, and parents receive a written report measuring progress against the child's last assessment.
So, What Are You Paying For?
A diagnostic process rigorous enough to tell your child's actual reading profile. A trained clinician who can read an error pattern and know exactly what it means. A sequence that never skips a step, or ignores your child's needs. A programme that re-assesses and adjusts with your child's needs, every step of the way. Most importantly, you are paying for accountability. You are paying for intervention that is measured. We do not simply teach and hope. We assess, teach, track, adjust and reassess so that both you and we can see whether your child is progressing.
If you have questions about your own child's reading, I would rather you ask me directly than guess. You can reach us at thinktopinstitute@gmail.com or 1-868-483-7509.
Warm regards, Ms. Krys-Darcelle Dumas Founder and Lead Educator Think-Top Educational Institute
About the author: Krys-Darcelle Dumas is the Founder and Lead Educator at Think-Top Educational Institute in St. Augustine, Trinidad. She is an English and literacy educator whose work includes reading assessment and structured intervention for struggling readers.
