Early Intervention or Wait and See?

My work as an educational therapist with adults to preschoolers aligns with the most respected educational researchers who are calling for early intervention.  

“Ninety percent of children with reading difficulties will achieve grade level in reading if they receive help by the first grade.

Seventy-five percent of children whose help is delayed to age nine or later continue to struggle throughout their school careers.” —Vellutino, Scanlon, Sipay, Small, Pratt, Chen & Denckla, 1996 “

“The best solution to the problem of reading failure is to allocate resources for early identification and prevention”
(Torgesen, 1998 in “Catch Them Before They Fall.”)

Tools for teaching spelling

Researchers have proven that phonological awareness is closely linked to reading success.   This is the ability to hear and manipulate the sounds in our language that combine to create meaningful words.  

English has 44 sounds that are represented by 26 random squiggle marks we call our alphabet.  Some children, lack awareness of the position of their lips, tongue, and teeth as they produce words.   With modeling and practice students unlock valuable information for spelling simply by tuning into mouth position and movements.

A multi-sensory approach to literacy will improve the alphabetic code for struggling children.  Logically, if a child fails to experience all of the sounds in a word they will struggle to spell it correctly.  One of my students recently asked for help with her spelling.  Her mom was desperately trying to understand why spelling "people" was so confusing.  As we examined the mouth shapes she used to vocalize "people" we quickly discovered that she was actually pronouncing "peepo".    

A few minutes later, with the help of:

•  dental mirror,

• BIG mouth model,

• multi-sensory analysis of the correct mouth positions

• fun game of rhyming

The inclusion of the "le" at the end of "people"  clicked! 

Multi-sensory learning involves tuning into  3 critical learning channels of the brain: 

• Consider how words look as your mouth moves while speaking

• Use a mirror to observe and isolate the mouth shapes associated with the sounds in words

• Describe the position of your tongue, teeth and lips 

• Words and sounds also create feelings in our mouth, and throat

• Experiment saying a word with your tongue in a different positon

• Words sound different as we listen to them 

• Try to identify which parts of two similar words sound different, feel different and look different

• Listen for the similarities and differences in words that you are speaking 

3 Learning Channels for Multi-sensory literacy development