This is what kinesthetic learning looks like

Kinesthetic learning, also known as hands-on or physical learning, is a learning style often suited to children with dyslexia.

Learning Pathways

Our senses—touch, sight, hearing, taste, and smell—are how our body captures information about our surroundings. For example, scent is potent at evoking memories. Every time I smell jasmine, I’m transported back to the porch of my childhood home, which had a sizeable potted jasmine.

In teaching reading and spelling, the three main senses we use are:

1. Sight (the visual pathway)

2. Hearing (the auditory pathway)

3. Touch (the kinesthetic pathway)

Although you can add an essential oil scent to salt trays or Play-Doh, for the most part, it isn’t practical to involve taste and smell in teaching reading and spelling.

Dyslexic Students Favour Kinesthetic Learning

An article in the electronic Journal of Research in Educational Psychology*2 compared dyslexic and non-dyslexic university students and concluded that:

“…dyslexic students differ from their non-dyslexic peers in their preferred sensory learning style. Kinaesthetic learning was the most favoured by the dyslexic students, while the non-dyslexic students favoured visual learning.”

Kinesthetic Learning Is Powerful

Maire Rippel’s blog post on All About Learning Press explains why using as many pathways to learning as possible benefits learners.

“Think of your eyes, ears, and hands as information receptors for your brain.

Your senses gather information and send it to your brain for processing. Then, your brain decides whether to pay attention to the information. If it does, the data is stored in your short-term memory for further processing. The more information receptors you involve, the better the chance that the brain will retain the information.

Interestingly, when children are taught using all three pathways to the brain—visual, auditory, and kinesthetic—they learn more than when taught through only one pathway*1. The more senses we involve, the more learning occurs. So even if your child prefers visual learning, it is still important to teach through all three pathways.”

 

Kids Love to Move

I’m teaching my niece to spell using the resources from All About Spelling. It’s terrific seeing her progress, and as it has been a while since I used these resources with my son, Harry, it’s reminded me that children learn best with a multisensory approach. My niece enjoys building words using letter tiles. Before she spells a new word, she breaks it into its phonemes by manipulating dominoes, one for each sound.

She’s a squirmer. I suspect she also had ADD, which is typical for kids with dyslexia (around 50-60% of people with ADHD also have a learning disability). Here’s a post from Attitude.com which looks at this link more closely. Although I keep the lesson to around 30 minutes, whenever I see her attention wandering, I get her to hop the spelling word or to bounce a ball as she says each letter.

Kinesthetic Learning Techniques

Kinesthetic learners learn best through movement and hands-on activities. In the 1930s, Samuel Orton, one of the founders of the Orton-Gillingham technique, encouraged students to write in the air with their fingers and trace oversized letters while simultaneously saying the names and sounds of the letters. He understood that integrating the right and left hemispheres of the brain would improve reading and spelling. To learn more about the Orton-Gillingham Approach, click here.

Kinesthetic Learning Activities for Teaching Reading.

These ideas are taken from a blog post by This Reading Mama. Read the full article here.

• Play hopscotch with sight words or letters.

• Use Lego to snap together blocks for each syllable or phoneme you hear in a word.

• Sight Word Twister. Fill each circle on the twister mat with a different sight word and play as usual with the child reading the word they land on.

• Write words in shaving cream, salt, or cornmeal. My son’s Kindergarten had a trough of flour for the kids to play in, but as my son has coeliac disease, this made him very sick, so I prefer cornmeal.

• Shoot words with Nerf guns. Write words on a dry-erase board and have the child shoot them as they read.

• Print words onto cards and place them on the stairs. Then, ask the child to run up and down to find the words.

• Print out sight words and have them swot the word with a fly swot.

• Make words out of Play-Doh.

• Write words in a salt tray. Click here for 10 Salt trays for Fun Writing Practice.

• Check out Marie Ripple’s Reading and Spelling Review page for multisensory game ideas.

A fun way I taught my son his multiplication tables was through stories. Check out the post here.

What other kinesthetic learning activities have you used to teach your child to read or spell?

Please comment on this post to let me know.

To learn more about how I use All About Learning resources to teach spelling and reading in 30 minutes a day, click here.

Speechify is an app that can help dyslexic children as it reads online text. Here is my affiliate link.

1. Farkus, R.D. (2003). Effects of traditional versus learning-styles instructional methods on middle school students. The Journal of Educational Research, 97(1), 42-51.
2. Aglaia Stampoltzis et al. Learning sensory modalities and educational characteristics of Greek dyslexic and non-dyslexic university students. Electronic Journal of Research in Educational Psychology, 8(2), 561-580. 2010 (nº 21). ISSN: 1696-2095