Top Multisensory Reading Techniques

How to Teach Reading - Top 10 Multisensory Reading Techniques

Using multisensory reading techniques in your daily reading instruction will greatly help students with reading and language issues. Students with specific reading disabilities like dyslexia can learn to read with greater fluency, greater comprehension and with less struggle when using Multisensory Reading Techniques. Going from practice to praxis always needs to include intelligent repeated actions between the teacher and students.

For some children, reading is just a normal part of growing up and the skill steadily improves over time. For others, it can be a real challenge and this is especially true for those struggling with dyslexia or perhaps even those who have other issues including the simple use of sight, touch, movement, or hearing. In these scenarios, engaging more than one sense can be incredibly useful so multisensory learning techniques are what we will be discussing today! Going multimodal is critical for praxis, the use of kinesthetic muscle memory, the wisdom of the hand/mind connection, seeing, listening, saying, and touching ELA concepts. 

Word Dance - Take a difficult word that students need to master and create a word dance, a series of gestures and kinesthetic body movements that help students visualize concepts through dramatic gestures. Students can use American Sign Language gestures or create their own gestures. Whole Brain Teaching uses The Crazy Professor Reading Game to power up kinesthetic learning. 

Back to Writing - As the name suggests, this technique will see students using their fingers to write letters and words on their partners back. They say the sounds and syllables as they write letters, phoneme forms, and words. Special care can be used to enforce differentiate between ‘b’ 'p' 'q', and ‘d’ and other common errors. To help even further, students can write the complete word and have students guess the word as part of a game. Back to writing can also be turned into a great team building game. 

Procedure from: https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/back-writing

1. Put students into teams (no more than eight or so in each team) and get each team to line up facing the board.

1. The student at the front of each team needs chalk or a board pen. Show a word or a picture to all the students who are at the back of each line. Use a word you've studied in class, that all the students should know.

1. The students at the back of the line should ‘write' each letter of the word with their finger, on the back of the student in front of them in the line. The students pass the letters down the line by doing the same and ‘writing' the letters in turn on the back of the student in front of them.

1. The student at the front of the line writes the letters on the board to make the word. The first team with the word written correctly on the board wins.

Palm and Air Writing - As the name also suggests, this technique will see students using their fingers to write letters or words in the air or on a flat surface. Again they say the letters and the sounds as they write the letter forms and or words in the air, on a desk, or on their palms. This can also be turned into a game and team guilding activity. The student can air spell or even use AMERICA SIGN LANGUAGE with the same procedures in the Write to Back game.

Word Building - Find a set of fridge magnets or a set of scrabble letters, word building exercises can be fantastic for learning. You can make a set of letters and or phonemes to target specific phonics goals. Vowels appear in specific clusters within a single word, and building words using the digraphs help students see common patterns. For example, you could have one color for consonants, consonant blends, diphthongs, and another for single vowels, diphthongs, digraphs, and diphthongs. If you add in sounds for each letter, the student will be engaging colors, sounds, phonemes, and letters all together as one concept to build individual words. With physical magnets and scrabble letters, touch will also play a huge role and the shape will be attained easily. 

Sand Writing - After grabbing a tray, lay out some sand and allow the student to write with their fingers. For many, this will keep them engaged whilst using sight, sound, and touch once again to spell words and write letters. With all of these exercises, students will need sound each letter or word as they write and the connection will then be made. In truth, sand could even be replaced with shaving cream or any other similar substance.

Sandpaper - Sometimes, paper just isn't enough to engage the touching element which is where sandpaper can come in and play a pivotal role. Much like magnets, students will get a feel for the letters whilst connecting this to the sound as they talk aloud. Again, different colors can be used and words can be spelled on the table after cutting the letters out.

Broken Telephone - One person whispers a message to the ear of the next person through a line of people until the last player announces the message to the entire group. Although the objective is to pass around the message without it becoming misheard and altered along the way, part of the enjoyment is that, regardless, this usually ends up happening.

Read, Build, Write - Using sight words, magnetic letters, and then a marker, students can follow this process for each word. With three boxes on a piece of paper, the teacher and student can first ‘Read’ the word together. Then, the student can use the magnets to ‘Build’ the word before using the marker to ‘Write’ the word.

Story Sticks - For more advanced practice, story sticks can be a great addition for comprehension. Often, students will struggle to answer questions on a story but what if you were to introduce simple colored sticks? Whilst reading together, the teacher could hand across simple sticks asking questions such as ‘where does the story take place’ or ‘who is the main character’.

Shared Digital Reading - Nowadays, there is a multitude of digital resources available and this includes audio versions of most chapter books as well as printable excerpts of books. Whilst reading in small groups with the teacher is preferred that is not always possible in large classrooms, students can use these to follow the story and share and underline points of interest. 

Chunking and Tapping - Finally, the tapping system is yet another great technique to test. Taking a simple word like ‘cat’ as an example, the word begins with a harsh ‘c’ sound which will bring their index finger to their thumb. With the short ‘a’ sound, their middle finger can be tapped. To finish, their ring finger can tap the thumb for the ’t’ sound. With this, words will become segmented and easier to understand and remember.

There we have it, ten fantastic techniques that encourage students to use more than one sense which will improve understanding as well as memory recall in the future!

TEACHER RESOURCES
[PDF]Multisensory Activities to Teach Reading Skills - Minnesota Literacy ...
effective it was for teaching reading to young elementary students, especially in ... 

been on usingmulti-sensory techniques to teach reading skills and sight word ...

[PDF]Using MultiSensory Methods in Reading and Literacy ... - Heidi Songs
The use of multisensory approaches to reading and literacy instruction ... also gain 

positive experiences from using multisensory methods with ...

[PDF]Multisensory Classroom Techniques
Using a multisensory teaching approach means helping a child ... looking at diagrams 

or pictures, orreading what is ... Multisensory learning techniques provide.

[PDF]Multi-Sensory Approaches to Teaching Reading - Unlocking Learning ...
developed multi-sensory methods to teach children to read and to achieve in ... website http://www.iahp.org/fileadmin/PDFs/Five_Principles.pdf.

[PDF]Multisensory Structured Language (MSL) - The International Dyslexia ...
Multisensory teaching is simultaneously visual, auditory, and ... began using 

multisensory techniques in the mid-. 1920's at ... letters while reading and writing.

[PDF]effectiveness of a multisensory, orton-gillingham influenced
APPROACH TO READING INTERVENTION FOR HIGH SCHOOL ...... 

specified both the content and strategies used in multisensory structured language.

[PDF]MULTI- SENSORY TEACHING TECHNIQUES IN FOREIGN ...
history of reading is followed by chapter on reading instructions for learning 

disabled pupils. ... successfully through use of multisensory teaching techniques. in ...

[PDF]Using Multisensory Methods In Reading And Literacy PDF ...
... synthetic multisensory phonics in ... by using multisensory methods for 

teaching reading. ... [PDF] structured multisensory techniques in reading and learning .

[PDF]3. Multisensory Teaching Methods: Tutoring Joey
Gillingham (O-G) and other multisensory methods to teach students they believe are ... 

curriculum for Teaching Reading, Writing and Spelling in the Elemen.