The Why
Whether you are introducing a new letter and its sound or reteaching a letter and sound, in a small group/intervention setting, multisensory activities can be a game changer for students. “A Multi sensory approach for phonics helps an individual learn by using more than one sense. For children with dyslexia, [all children the use of visual, auditory, kinesthetic, and tactile modalities can be very helpful. ” This is from Orton Gillingham Online Tutor .com. You can read so much more here!
It’s just common sense isn’t it that if you hear something, see something, and act it out then it’s going far deeper into the long-term memory part of our brain than just receiving that information in one form? That is why a multi sensory approach to phonics instruction makes so much sense. And we know that if students have more than just one thing to do, then they will be more engaged (teacher evaluations anyone?) and we all learn differently. By using multisensory instruction techniques you grab your visual, auditory, and kinesthetic learners all in one swoop! If that’s not a teacher win, IDK what is.
Ideas! Yes, Please!
With all of this in mind, it can be a bit time-consuming to come up with multisensory teaching ideas for everything you teach. For all the things, I love Whole Brain Teaching Mirror Words, but for phonics specifically, I want to help you out! Read on for some easy-peasy ideas to incorporate a multi sensory approach to your phonics instruction!
Here are some ideas that you can easily adapt to almost all phonics learning!
- Sand, beads, sprinkles, gell bags, etc to write letters in
- Youtube directed drawings. Search for a directed drawing for a key words for that phoneme/grapheme coorospondance.
- Find a way to add in food! Kids love learning with food.
- To mimic the tip above, find a way to add in ART! Kids love learning with art.
- Can you take your students outside? I’m think Ll /l/ let’s find some leaves!
- More to come!
Below, you will find multisensory ideas for each letter and the most common digraphs. Let’s start at the beginning, shall we?
Are you following me on Tik Tok? Because you can see all of these in action there!
- Aa/a/ Key Word Apple: Give students an apple slice, take bites, and say /a/ each time they do. Put a small dollop of apple sauce on students’ desks. Have them practice writing a capital and lowercase Aa in the apple sauce. Are there any other key words than apple? Maybe alligator? Instruct students to create and alligator with their hands (think baby/mamma shark) They can alligator all the /a/ words that they hear.
- Bb/b/ Have kids practice throwing up a ball (scrap paper ball will work) each time they hear a word with a /b/ sound. You can say the words, or watch a fun Jack Harman Youtube Bb video.
- Cc/k/ Give students a fudge strip, (or the Kroger brand if you are “frugal” like me) fudge stripe cookie. Studens can carefully nibble a bit of the cookie each time you say a /k/ word. Be sure to throw some non /k/ words in there just for funzies! The end result will hopefully be a C shaped cookie. Draw a large C and brain storm words that begin with C. Give students a cup and instruct them to put tiny c’s that they “cut” (get the C reference) out in the cup when they hear a /k/ word
- Dd/d/ all the way to Zz/z/ Coming soon!
- I have all the ideas for ya’ll! I just have to get the crazy mess express brain to organze and write them out! Coming soon though, promise!
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