Multisensory Lesson Creation

To create multisensory lessons for your child, you must first think of your learning goals and the main learning channels--auditory, visual, and kinesthetic/tactile.

When you have determined what you want your child to learn, you should list each of the three learning styles and think of a way to teach your child the topic using an auditory means of input, a visual means of input, and a kinesthetic/tactile means of input. Research shows that simultaneous usage of the learning styles is most effective.

As an example, a combination of auditory and visual input is more effective than auditory input followed by visual input. If you read a text to your child THEN show him an image of the subject, say cloud types, it will be less effective than showing him a stratus cloud as you read text about stratus clouds aloud.

Even more effective would be to go outside, look up to see the type of cloud, read aloud about that type of cloud, and have your child point out characteristics of stratus clouds as he is looking at one outside. This type of multisensory learning is both experiential and multisensory. Information taught in this way is much more likely to be retained than reading about the clouds in a book, particularly if there are no accompanying images.

For different subjects, there are different multisensory means of teaching each subject. Tutorial sections following this section will cover teaching reading, math, science and social studies through multisensory methods. From there, it should be easier for you to develop a multisensory unit to teach any topic.