Meet Sallie Pure

It helps to have the last name "Pure" - it goes with so many nouns - and as a teacher, it made perfect sense to put "learning" after my name. Pure Learning started when my triplet children were four years old. As a reading specialist, who had experience in the classroom and in the private learning center arena, starting a small tutoring business seemed like the logical next step. I could set my own hours, focus on working 1:1 with students who had dyslexia and other learning issues, homeschool my own children, AND I could develop materials along the way - something I always enjoyed doing as a teacher.

When I began working as a reading specialist at a Montessori school, I started implementing spelling lessons I had developed. Orton-Gillingham-based lessons with explicit skills instruction involving letters and sounds AND the use of three modalities - visual, auditory, and kinesthetic - were the most effective. Some of my students were strong in one area but weak in another. By presenting all three modalities in a lesson, each student could find their own strength and I could see how my student learned best. The teachers saw the difference the lessons I had created were making in their students' spelling and writing and craved a program that would teach them how to teach spelling AND make sense to the students. From that, Working with Words evolved.

Fast forward 20+ years and, today, I can look back and know that this Orton-Gillingham-based, multisensory approach focused on phonics and the six syllable types has been successful with early, struggling, resistant, underconfident, AND strong readers and spellers. Teachers who have used Working with Words better understand the generalizations and rules that exist in spelling English words and how to teach them.

What was consistent at the beginning of my teaching career and remains so today is my energy and focus on helping children learn to read and spell in a "pure" and simple fashion and designing materials to aid teachers in doing the same!