I encourage you to take the next seven minutes to watch the video on our Scottish Rite Children’s Dyslexia Centers here in Maine.
We thank Sue Scacchi, Executive Director of the Maine Masonic Charitable Foundation, and the very supportive Trustees of the MMCF for funding and spearheading this project that will greatly help us spread the word on dyslexia, our efforts to serve children with this condition, as well as the need for tutors and corporate and community financial support.
Maine Scottish Rite is proud to be a sponsor of the two Childrens’ Dyslexia Centers in Maine. These Portland and Bangor centers have helped thousands of Maine children. It costs $5,000 per year to tutor each student. They are committed to providing tutoring services at no cost to families. In order to meet this commitment, they rely on the generous support of our community. Every dollar that you contribute to their Annual Appeal helps to provide life-changing tutoring services for dyslexic students.
The Orton-Gillingham Approach is a structured and multi- sensory approach which helps students break down words into individual letters and sounds, learn the relationship between the sounds and their symbols, and then build on this information while exploring blends, spelling rules, prefixes and suffixes, and language roots.
Samuel T. Orton and Anna Gillingham are the originators of the Orton-Gillingham Approach. Samuel Torrey Orton (1879-1948) was a neuropsychiatrist and pathologist. He was a pioneer in focusing attention on reading failure and related language processing difficulties. He brought together neuroscientific information and principles of remediation. As early as 1925 he had identified the syndrome of dyslexia as an educational problem. Anna Gillingham (1878-1963) was a gifted educator and psychologist with a superb mastery of the language. Encouraged by Dr. Orton, she compiled and published instructional materials as early as the 1930s which provided the foundation for student instruction and teacher training in what became known as the Orton-Gillingham Approach.