What are the benefits of teaching with multisensory activities? This student-authored post is part of a series that highlights student perspectives around learning and executive function in the classroom.
One of the best ways you can engage your students with learning differences is by using multisensory practices.
What is Multisensory Learning?
Multisensory learning occurs when a student uses multiple senses to learn information. The goal of multisensory learning is to allow your students to connect to the material being taught in many different ways. Students with and without learning differences can benefit from a multisensory approach since it allows students to make new connections and strengthen memories.
Engaging through Multisensory Activities
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve noticed that teachers use the same multisensory techniques from first grade through high school, but it is important for teachers to adapt their multisensory practices to better serve older students.
For instance, watching videos in class is a multisensory activity. In biology class, dissecting an animal is multisensory because it allows the students to see and touch the parts of the animal that are being studied. Science is a great subject for multisensory teaching because many experiments are naturally multisensory — a great reason to increase the number of hands-on experiments in science.
One multisensory activity for English and history classes is acting out scenes of a book or scenes from history. This allows students to immerse themselves in the time or book, helping them learn by interacting with the text in another way.
Students will learn best if you try to integrate different multisensory activities, instead of relying only on traditional teaching practices like lecturing. There are many different ways that you can approach multisensory teaching. It can be helpful to experiment and think of new multisensory activities that fit with what you are teaching.
Join us this November for the 36th Annual Executive Function Conference, which will focus on promoting resilience and equity for ALL students.
- C. Solomon, Student Contributor
SMARTS Executive Function Curriculum: smarts-ef.org
Research Institute for Learning and Development: researchild.org
The Institute for Learning and Development: ildlex.org
