Multisensory Phonics Instruction

Multisensory Phonics Instruction

A Brief Overview

Multisensory Phonics Instruction

Multisensory Phonics Instruction is the engagement of multiple senses to engage the learners during phonics instruction. The teacher should engage the learners using the following modalities: Visual Auditory Kinesthetic Tactile

Why It Matters

Macrolevel

Who It Helps

Microlevel

Promotes: Student Engagement Letter Knowledge

Helps: Struggling Readers Students with Dyslexia

Promotes: Phonemic Awareness Decoding

Ideas

Ideas

• Assists with working memory
• Motivating
• Engaging (Reading Rockets)

• Marching Syllables
• Skywriting
• Writing letters in sand or shaving cream
• Letter tiles (Lane)

• Small muscle movements
• Watching a mouth in a mirror while making sounds
• Noticing the placement of the lips and tongue (Lane)

Watch

Have students watch mouth placement in a mirror

Visual/Auditory

Display

Phonemic awareness is primarily learning the sounds of letters, but visual cues can help learners make phoneme-grapheme connections. (Reading Rockets)

Display letters, phonemes, as the students learn them

Watch

Overexaggerate the teacher mouth placement so students can clearly see how to make the sound

Kinesthetic

This modality incorporates movement with phonics instruction. According to the motor theory of speech perception (Liberman, 1999), articulatory gestures rather than acoustic features can represent phonemes in the brain.

Write

Move

Gesture

Air Write the letters and letter teams to develop phoneme-grapheme connections

Assign a gesture, like a finger over the lips for the "shh" sound for the /sh/ phoneme

Clap or stomp syllables to help develop awareness

Tactile

Allows students to experience and their phonics lessons.

Letter Tiles: Students can arrange and rearrange letter tiles to make words using the phonics skill they are working on

Carpet Writing: Students are tracing letters on the carpet while practicing saying the sounds they make

Shaving Cream Writing: Students write letters in shaving cream while saying the sound the letter makes

Check It Out

Science of Reading Formula

Collaborative Classroom

Reading Rockets

Check out more resources at these links!

Implementation

Where to Start

• Start Small
• Pick one strategy to implement
• Choose Wisely
• Start with no or low prep ideas, like carpet writing
• Use What You Have
• Pair with your exisiting phonics curriculum and see where you can supplement
• Involve Your Students
• Rather than giving them motions, let them decide what to do

Which part of your current phonics instruction could be strengthened by adding a multisensory element?

References

Lane, H. B. (n.d.). Multisensory Instruction: What Is It and Should I Bother? Collaborative Classroom: Home. https://www.collaborativeclassroom.org Liberman, A. M. (1999). The reading researcher and the reading teacher need the right theory of speech. Scientific Studies of Reading, 3(2), 95–111. Phonics Instruction: The Value of a Multi-sensory Approach. (n.d.). Reading Rockets. https://www.readingrockets.org