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Ready, Set, Read

Building a Love of Letters and Literacy Through Fun Phonics Activities

Chicago Review Press Incorporated

Child Development, Brain Research, and Multisensory Learning

Why Use a Multisensory Approach?

If friends show you photographs they took on their vacation, you show polite interest. If they show you photographs of a place you have actually been to, you probably will have genuine interest. Reference points aid our recall of something we understand. If we look through our own photographs, they conjure up a moment, a feeling, an experience. Each photograph can bring to mind people, places, sounds, sights, smells, tastes, emotions, and other memories. The photograph is a trigger, a starting point, to retrieve a real experience.

Teachers are faced with many opportunities and challenging responsibilities. Our primary job is to provide education in the form of meaningful experiences. If our teaching does not mean something to our students, we are wasting both our time and theirs. We cannot rely on books and flat images to provide the kinds of hands-on experiences that will spur our students' growth.

Experts in brain theory believe that emotional experiences stimulate the brain, and this in turn helps us to retrieve stored information efficiently. If the emotional experiences are positive, learning will be a happy experience (Jensen 1998). We all know that if we feel good about something, we'll want to do it again. Our young children are natural scientists; they thrive on pleasurable hands-on discoveries. A well-prepared multisensory approach in the classroom can provide such positive, stimulating learning experiences.

I will take this one step further. Multisensory methods can be used to teach even very young children how to read and write. If we do this properly, we can prevent a huge amount of fear from building up in association with the written word.

After years of teaching older students, I now teach three-, four-, and five-year-old children in a prekindergarten class. Generally people are respectful and polite when they learn that I am a teacher. Then comes the question, "What age do you teach?" I have been horrified to discover that when I reveal the age of my students, the questioner's reaction changes to one of dismissal; some have even exclaimed to me, "Oh, not a real teacher!" The general perception of teachers of very young children is that we are mere babysitters; my day must be spent crawling around on the floor, just playing.

It is true that my day is full of happiness, and a good deal of it is spent crawling around on the floor, but I work just as hard as when I taught older students, and in fact, I spend more time now on preparation because I cover a wider variety of activities during the school day — and three-year-olds are not that great at waiting! A three-year-old may take 15 seconds to paint a story, whereas an older child may stay absorbed for 15 minutes writing an account.

Far from being dismissed, teachers of preschoolers should be hailed as the scene setters. This young and tender age is when it is all happening. We are helping to develop an incredible potential. A three-year-old is receptive, generally uncontaminated with negative emotions, eager and ready to learn. Just consider how much a baby has to master in the first two years of life. The rate at which he makes progress in physical skills, language, and relationships is astounding. If we continued to discover and learn at that rate, we could all make meaningful conversation with the likes of Einstein, even on an off day!

A newborn has more than a trillion neural connections in the brain. At its peak, the embryo is generating brain cells at a rate of 250,000 each minute, or 15 million each hour. Soon after birth, the brain starts to prune away unneeded cells and billions of unused connections. How do we grow cells rather than lose cells? The same way we would grow anything — we feed those cells. The food the brain likes best is challenging sensory stimulation (Jensen 1998). We, as teachers of the young, need to ensure that the nutrition we provide is packed with a wide range of wholesome goodness: lots of positive multisensory adventures.

Child Development Studies

Let's take a brief look at child development studies, using Jean Piaget's theory about the stages of growth (Williams 1969). Piaget noted that each phase of development has its roots in the previous phase, and children move through the phases consecutively; they cannot jump from phase 1 to phase 5. This explains the source of the problems of many special-needs children. A piece of their developmental comprehension is lacking, which adversely affects everything that comes after. If early educators provide a plethora of experiences to enhance a child's understanding at every stage, taking a multisensory approach, we will be more likely to cover the needs of our children. The phases of development, as described by Piaget, are detailed in the chart at right.

The critical stage for us, phase 2, is the optimum time to introduce the code of written language. Children may not yet be able to physically reproduce what they can comprehend, but we can plant the seeds and tend the garden during this time when the mind is beginning to organize. In this preconceptual stage, two- to four-year-olds are gathering information about their environment to be used at a later stage; older children who are still in this phase of development are also gathering information for the next. Some children have limited experiences, and they cannot build on what is not there. We must provide experiences for them — memorable, hands-on experiences.

Brain Research

How do we learn? In essence, the brain rewires itself with each new stimulation, experience, and behavior. Each stimulus is sorted and processed on several levels. When a new task is initiated, many areas of the brain are activated. As we learn a task better, we use less of our brains for that task.

As the brain receives new information, impulses flow from the cell body down the axon. Most axons are about one centimeter long. The longest, in the spinal cord, are about one meter. Each axon branches repeatedly to pass information to other cells. Information is passed through the synaptic gap between the axon and the dendrites of the next cell. When the cell body sends an electrical discharge outward to the axon, it stimulates the release of stored chemicals into the synaptic gap.

As we repeat a learning experience, the neural pathways become more and more efficient as a fatty coating called myelin is added to the axons. This process is called myelination. The thicker the axon, the faster it conducts electricity and information. Myelination also reduces interference from other nearby reactions. When the environment is enriched, dendrites grow out and extend from the cell body (Jensen 1998).

The world is the brain's food: smells, sounds, sights, tastes, and touch all help to develop countless neural connections. In the classroom, we can help to forge and strengthen these neural connections by using positive emotional strategies, repetition, cross-training, and other learning techniques. The more senses we can involve, the more likely the learning will go into long-term memory (Jensen 1998).

For optimal learning, we will want to create an environment of flow (Csikszentmihalyi 1990). Flow is the term Csikszentmihalyi used to describe a state of absorption in which the body and mind are in harmony, we feel no self-consciousness, and the activity we are engaged in is motivating, meaningful, and satisfying. Athletes sometimes describe this state as being in the zone. The activity is challenging, but not so challenging that we are unable to meet the demand. To promote the possibility of flow for children, we need to eliminate or reduce stress and threat and maximize students' opportunities to experience deep concentration, enjoyment, success, and satisfaction.

Multisensory Teaching

So, why do we want to use a multisensory approach with phonics, reading, and writing instead of just letting children play in a multisensory environment? If we can introduce sounds and words in a meaningful, fun, relevant way, assisting children's ability to use written language, we can free our students' creative processes sooner rather than later.

Young children have fantastic stories to tell, and many are desperate to write them down. They need the secretarial skills of reading and writing, and the sooner they get them under their belts, the earlier they will be liberated in expressing their creative thoughts. We can eradicate or prevent related self-doubt, confusion, and fear by giving children these skills.

We don't want to miss the optimum time to learn. Once children feel in control of written language, they will want to extend their activities. They may not become novelists or poets, but they will surely want to surf the Internet, read the small print on a contract, or curl up with a good book. We must equip them with the independence and freedom to communicate and express themselves efficiently and effectively. We can do this using a physical multisensory approach.

Introducing the Alphabet

Children find their own ways in to reading and writing. No single prescribed method will successfully accommodate all children. Some children rely heavily on one strategy, while others use a combination of cues. A true multisensory approach should introduce as many "ways in" as possible to cover the needs of as many children as possible.

Young children should not have to try to adapt their minds to fit our preferred method of teaching. As the providers, we teachers need to have every channel open to make sure that we are giving each receptive mind the clues that it needs for each child to learn.

Although I use a variety of strategies and language cues, my experience is that most (but not all) children respond well to phonics, at least as part of their reading skills. I will share with you how I plan my year and how I introduce the sounds. So far, I have followed a new thematic plan and a new order for introducing the sounds each year, and I will probably continue to do so, especially considering I often teach the same children more than one year in a row.

I have tried all of the ideas suggested here with excellent results. Once you see how rewarding "discovering" a sound can be, you will come up with many, many ideas of your own. You need not be limited by your resources; some of my best inspirations came from my son's toy cupboard and the contents of my pantry.

Plan Your Year Thematically

My first suggestion is to plan your year thematically, then relate the sounds to your topics throughout the year. This is what takes the most time and may not be applicable to the way you teach. I offer this as a method that has worked well for me. At the beginning of each year, I sit down and plan the whole year, week by week, using a system of themes or topics. As I teach some children for two years running, at least every other year must be totally different from the year before. Topics I have used include the following.

• Me

• Journey to the land of nursery rhymes

• People who help us (community workers)

• The five senses

• Baby animals

• Opposites

• Transportation

• Shopping

• Cold

• Seasonal celebrations around the world

• Stories of three

Each theme may last from three weeks to two months. During that time, each child's work is collected in a book that she helps to make. The book consolidates the separate ideas that relate to the main theme, and it is a wonderful keepsake of which children will be proud. Before their work goes into the books, the children are delighted to see their creations mounted and displayed (a great confidence booster), and parents are usually thrilled that this precious time has been documented and preserved.

I try to pick out one major aspect of the theme to focus on each week. For instance, during the nursery rhymes topic, we might spend one week on "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star." I choose a sound to match the theme for that week, and I introduce one letter each week. (Chapter 3 contains activities and instructions for introducing each letter.) The letter for "Twinkle, Twinkle" week could be "t" for twinkle or "s" for star.

Toward the end of the year, the connections between the sounds and the topics may become contrived. This is fine, because most of the work on what a sound is has already been covered earlier in the year; you will have laid the foundations of the concept. You will still introduce each sound in a multisensory way; the themes are just another connection to bring it all to life.

Introduce Sounds in Any Order

There is no need to introduce sounds in alphabetical order. It is difficult to find relevant material that begins with "a" to illustrate that initial sound, and vowels are not the easiest letters to begin with anyway. The alphabet song provides all the references to alphabetical order that you need. Even by the time children have their own independent word books (personal dictionaries in which they write words, as described on page 212), they sing the alphabet song to themselves to help them find the sound they need. You can therefore start with easily recognizable sounds that begin familiar words related to fun and interesting objects and concepts.

I usually begin with "s." It offers many summer references, such as "sand" and "sun." It even looks like a snake! "S" is difficult for a child to reproduce accurately but is easily recognizable in any print. What an achievement when the child points out an "s" to his mom and dad! It is also great fun to say the "s" sound, especially if you're wriggling on the floor pretending to be snakes. "S" is a super stage setter for all your sound sensations.

The next two sounds are usually "t" and "m." "T" is very easy to draw with your finger, and the straight lines are a strong contrast to "s," making it easier for the children to successfully recognize and learn. The sounds are also very different — the everlasting "s" compared with the short, sharp "t." One of my brand-new three-year-olds apparently brought the house down at church after his second week at school. In a particularly quiet moment in the service, he pronounced loudly, "Look, Mom, there's a 't,'" as he pointed to the cross above the altar.

"M" has a distinctly recognizable look and sound, and again, there are many fun and relevant items in a child's life that begin with "m." I am grateful, for example, for the bold display of McDonald's golden arches that gives our children so many opportunities to identify the "m" sound, tell the world about it, and receive heaps of praise.

After these three letters, apart from the vowels, I allow the order of introduction of the letters to be guided by the themes I have planned. Try to leave the vowels for near the end of the year. By this time, you will be able to introduce consonant-vowel-consonant word building to some of the children, and the introduction of the vowels at this time works extremely well.

Always focus on the sound of the letter, not its name, and really emphasize initial consonants. Tell the children that all letters have a name, just as each child has a name, and that is what we sing in the alphabet song. I am sure we have all witnessed a child's puzzled face when an adult is trying to help her understand "see-ay-tee." This does not provide the building blocks the child needs to comprehend the word "cat," which really sounds like "kuh-ah-tuh."

When letters have more than one sound, deal with one sound at a time so that the child can really identify that sound and letter without any added complications. Once he's mastered that, it's quite easy to introduce an alternative because it is special information to the child.

See, Hear, and Touch Each Letter

I have created what I call the "feely phonic alphabet." These big "feely" letters are essential when I introduce each letter. Each feely letter relates to a word beginning with that sound. For example, the "e" is gray and has elephant features as a reminder that "e" sounds like the beginning of "elephant." The feely phonic alphabet is very easy to make, and I have included instructions and a pattern for each letter in chapter 3.

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Excerpted from Ready, Set, Read by Janet Chambers. Copyright © 2003 Janet Chambers. Excerpted by permission of Chicago Review Press Incorporated.
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