trugs for dyslexia and SpLD
For learners with dyslexia, structured programmes do the teaching. trugs supplies the one thing they can never have too much of: motivating, repeatable decoding practice.
Part 2 looked at how trugs sits beside a school’s mainstream phonics programme. This part is about the learners for whom decoding never comes easily, and the specialist programmes built to help them. It is, in many ways, where trugs proves itself most clearly – provided we are precise about which job it is doing.
Why this is trugs’ strongest home
Structured, multisensory literacy programmes (Orton-Gillingham and its descendants) are painstaking, expert work. They teach explicitly, in a fixed cumulative order, engaging sight, sound and touch together, and they diagnose continually so that teaching lands exactly where the learning has broken down.
But they depend on two things that are genuinely hard to supply in sufficient quantity.
The first is over-learning. A dyslexic learner typically needs far more repetitions than a typical reader to fix a single correspondence, e.g. to make igh automatic rather than effortful. Every specialist teacher knows this. The trouble is that the volume required is more than a weekly session can hold, and drilling it can be dull, which brings us to the second thing.
The second is motivation. These are learners who have often spent years associating print with failure. Their willingness to keep practising is fragile, and it is precisely what the whole endeavour rests on. Orton-Gillingham has always recognised this: one of its founding principles is that teaching should be emotionally sound and that rebuilding a discouraged learner’s confidence is not an added extra but part of the method.
A game speaks directly to both. It converts the repetition dyslexia demands into something a learner will choose to repeat. That is Part 1’s first idea, the volume of successful practice is the lever, in its sharpest form, because in remediation the volume is higher and the willingness is thinner.
Being clear about the boundary
Here is the honest part, and it matters more with this audience than any other. trugs is decoding and reading practice. It is not a dyslexia programme, and it does not do what a structured multisensory programme does. It is no substitute for the kinaesthetic letter-formation work, for Simultaneous Oral Spelling, or for the explicit teaching of spelling rules, syllable division and morphology that these programmes are built around. Handling cards and reading aloud give trugs a mild visual, oral and tactile quality, but that is not “multisensory” in the technical sense the Orton-Gillingham tradition means.
So the accurate description is the third idea from Part 1, stated as plainly as it can be: trugs follows the progression and supplies the practice; it doesn’t replace the teaching. The specialist does the teaching. trugs supplies the reading mileage that teaching needs to become automatic.
That is not a hedge, it is the point. Specialist teachers are rightly wary of anything that presents itself as a one-stop dyslexia fix, and a tool that knows exactly which job it is doing is a tool you can trust with the job.
Set against the Orton-Gillingham principles, the fit looks like this:
| Orton-Gillingham principle | trugs |
| Structured, sequential, cumulative | Direct fit – fifteen stages in a fixed building order |
| Diagnostic and prescriptive | Place the learner at the exact step they stall on |
| Over-learning to automaticity | Core strength – repetition a learner will willingly repeat |
| Direct and explicit | Practises what the teacher has explicitly taught |
| Synthetic and analytic | Both: blending to read, and words grouped by shared pattern |
| Emotionally sound (confidence) | Age-neutral, success-oriented, low-shame |
| Multisensory (VAK/T) | Partial – not a substitute for VAKT letter formation or SOS |
| Encoding, spelling rules, morphology | Programme-led, not trugs |
The last two rows are the boundary. Everything above them, trugs strengthens.
Where it maps: Alpha to Omega and the OG lineage
Alpha to Omega (Hornsby and Shear) is a three-stage structured, multisensory, phonetic-linguistic programme for dyslexic learners, used with children and adults alike. Its sequence follows the same staircase from Part 1, so trugs lines up against it tidily:
| Decoding step | Alpha to Omega | trugs |
| Single letter sounds; oral blending | Stage One (start) | Stage 0 |
| CVC short-vowel words (sad, pin) | Stage One | Pack 1 |
| Blends, digraphs, nasal blends (lamp, lunch) | Stage One | Pack 1 → Pack 2 |
| Long vowels, magic e | Stage Two | Pack 2 → Pack 3 |
| Alternative vowel spellings | Stage Two/Three | Pack 3 |
| Multisyllabic words, prefixes, suffixes, rules | Stage Three | Pack 3 for decoding; rules stay with the programme |
The same logic holds across the programmes a UK specialist will recognise: the Orton-Gillingham approach itself (the parent method rather than a single scheme; direct, explicit, multisensory, structured, sequential, diagnostic and prescriptive); the Hickey Multisensory Language Course; the Dyslexia Action Literacy Programme, successor to the Dyslexia Institute programme, which draws on Orton-Gillingham-Stillman, Cox, Hickey and Hornsby; and Units of Sound, widely used with older learners. trugs’ role across all of them is identical: the decoding-practice and over-learning layer, placed at the matching step.
There’s a pleasing irony worth noting: Alpha to Omega and the Hornsby tradition have always used games for reinforcement. trugs isn’t grafting something foreign onto specialist practice. It is providing something that tradition already valued.
What it looks like in practice
A specialist teacher has just introduced consonant blends to a Year 4 pupil in their weekly one-to-one session. The pupil needs many more repetitions than that hour can possibly hold before the blends become automatic and the teacher knows that without them, next week starts halfway back. trugs Pack 2 goes into a daily five-minute slot, run by a TA or at home, on exactly those blend words. Nothing new is introduced. It is pure over-learning between sessions, and the next session starts where the last one finished.
Or take a Year 9 pupil on a Hickey course who is secure on short vowels but reads them slowly and effortfully, accurate, but with every ounce of attention going into the words rather than the meaning. The gap here isn’t knowledge, it’s automaticity, and automaticity only comes from mileage. Pack 1–2 as a fluency game supplies it, and because trugs is age-neutral, a fourteen-year-old will actually play it. That last point isn’t a small thing. The practice that doesn’t happen has no effect at all.
Start where the learner is
Both examples turn on the second series idea: place by decoding skill, not age. This is also how specialist teaching already works; Orton-Gillingham’s diagnostic-prescriptive principle is precisely the instruction to teach to the point of need. A short decoding check finds where a learner breaks down, and the practice starts there, whether they are seven, fourteen or an adult on a post-16 programme.
This brings us to the practical question this whole series has been circling: how do you actually place a learner, choose a pack, and build the practice into a week?
Coming next, Part 4: Putting trugs to work. Placing a learner, choosing a pack, and keeping practice little, often and in step with the programme; a practical guide to using trugs well, in class, one-to-one and at home.
A note on sources: programme descriptions here reflect how Orton-Gillingham, Alpha to Omega, Hickey, DALP and Units of Sound are currently published; all revise periodically, so it’s always worth confirming specifics as needed.