Greetings! Welcome to Orton Gillingham Mama.

I am Pryor Rayburn and I am thrilled you are here.

As a teacher, I always loved watching my students grow and develop throughout the course of the school year. But my heart always ached for my struggling readers.

I’ll be honest that I was not prepared or trained to REALLY help them learn to read. Several of my students were pulled out of class for one-on-one Orton Gillingham tutoring. I had no clue what Orton Gillingham even was.

But I will tell you, I was completely BLOWN AWAY at the progress they made and the strategies they learned. They would return to class tapping their fingers to spell and rattled off all of this knowledge about syllable types.

Seriously, second graders and syllable types? I wasn’t even aware there were types of syllables!

I knew immediately that I wanted to learn those strategies so I could help ALL of my students. So, in 2007, I trained in the Orton Gillingham approach. It was extraordinary! The following year, I continued my training through the Certified level with the Key Learning Center in Asheville, NC. I studied under renown fellows JoAnn Crawford and Concha Wyatt. They taught me how to layer my Orton Gillingham lessons and how to masterfully incorporate all strands of the reading rope into one lesson.

Since then, I have become a Fellow-in-training with the Orton Gillingham Academy. I have worked with hundreds of students and educators in all parts of reading instruction.

In 2010, I became a mom to a precious little girl. As a teacher, I knew the importance of early language and literacy skills, but as a mom I began to dive deeper. I became fascinated with brain-based learning and exposing young brains to language-rich resources. My second child was born two years later and I was lucky to continue my journey tutoring students in the Orton Gillingham approach.

It was around this time (when balancing the demands of being a mom and tutoring) that I started to really think about how I could help teachers reach struggling readers. Teachers have a lot to juggle as well, so I started creating quality, no-prep resources for teachers to use in their classrooms and in their tutoring sessions. I used the same multisensory approaches that were successful with my students to guide my creation of new resources.

Fast forward to today: I’ve now sold over 33,000 resources!

I have built a wonderful community of educators from all over the world who are all passionate about helping kids learn to read. I stay current in the science of reading, which plays a crucial role in my creation of meaningful and effective resources. I know what students need to become successful readers, and I am passionate about equipping teachers and parents with the resources to help their students. I continue to add new resources to my store, so I hope that you will check back here often!

My background and training:

  • Fellow-in-Training through the Orton Gillingham Academy
  • Orton Gillingham Academy Member at the Certified Level
  • Certified Academic Language Therapist (CALT) through the Academic Language Therapist Association (ALTA)
  • Master’s degree in Special Education with a focus on Orton Gillingham
  • BA from Davidson College, NC
  • Past president of the NC branch of the International Dyslexia Association
  • Former Director of the Educational Resource Center at a private K-12 school
  • Former elementary classroom teacher
  • Former Orton Gillingham reading specialist
  • A self-proclaimed “word nerd” and lifelong learner!

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