Interactive English Lesson Planning Software
The Great Word House ™ is an interactive software application with which teachers can dynamically generate, student individual, language lesson plans. The Great Word House ™ application has been developed in cooperation with an international recognized Dyslexia professor and Fellow of the Academy of Orton-Gillingham; miss Evelyn Reiss.
Orton-Gillingham
The Great Word House is fully based on the Orton-Gillingham (OG) approach. Orton-Gillingham is an instructional approach intended primarily for use with persons who have difficulty with reading, spelling, and writing of the sort associated with dyslexia. The Orton-Gillingham approach is a time-tested knowledge and practice that has been validated over the past 70 years. It is also based on scientific evidence on how persons learn to read and write; why a large group has difficulty in doing so and how having dyslexia makes learning these skills more difficult.
Lesson Planning
The Orton-Gillingham approach is used in small group instruction. Lesson plans are often individualized, and it’s therefor why preparing lessons is very time-consuming. Teachers often spend their weekend planning the lessons for the following week. They have to find the words which match the graphemes they want to focus on. They have to find the sentences that match the words. With the Great Word House™ application we have automated that process. Teachers can now, with a few clicks, generate quality controlled OG lesson plans.
The Great Word House™ – Lesson Planning
We have taken 90.000 words and put them in a database. Each word has been manually coded the OG way; which sounds does the word make, which graphemes does it have, which syllable pattern does it have. For each word we have also specified if it has a prefix, if it has a suffix and even if a specific spelling rule applies. All this information is now in our database.
Teachers can now create student individual lesson plans using our Anglo-Saxon, Latin or Greek resource database. Each lesson package contains definitions of terminology used, word lists, sentences and passages for dictation/reading based on the teacher’s choice. Anglo-Saxon (AS) lesson plans can be designed around graphemes, affixes, clusters, syllable type, and spelling rules. Latin lesson plans are designed around your choice of prefix, root or suffix. Greek lesson plans are based on an individual Greek Combining Form. AS and Latin plans contain teacher tracking sheets for reading and spelling, and a comprehensive list of Sight Words.
Student Individual Tracking
The Great Word House ™ application can keep track of progress on a teacher/student level. The program memorizes, per student, which selections have been used to generate lesson plans. These selections are highlighted so the teacher has a visual overview of the student’s progress.
Next to this the application memorizes which words, sentences and passages have been used in each lesson plan. This way, if the teacher makes the same selection, the program will use other words, other sentences and passage to fill the lesson plan.
Lesson Planning – Worldwide
The Great Word House ™ application is being used in schools worldwide to create quality English language lesson plans. In this very moment schools in the following countries are either using the program or are in the middle of running a pilot:
- Canada
- United States
- Bahamas
- Australia
- United Kingdom
Please read more about our Great Word House ™ program on http://greatwordhouse.com
