What Multisensory Instruction Looks Like in Effective Literacy Lessons

In literacy instruction, multisensory teaching is often misunderstood. Some educators associate it with hands-on activities like sand trays or shaving cream. Others dismiss it as lacking evidence. Neither view is accurate.

Multisensory (or multimodal) instruction is not a set of activities. It is a way of planning instruction so students use multiple pathways—such as seeing, saying, hearing, and writing—to support learning that is more durable and easier to retrieve. This approach is particularly important for students with dyslexia and others learning to read.

In our Together In Literacy discussion in 5.15 Why Multisensory Teaching Can Help Dyslexic Students With Memory, we talked about the critical role multimodal teaching plays in supporting students with dyslexia. Below we’ll talk about what multisensory instruction is and is not, and how to bring it effectively into the classroom.

What Multisensory Instruction Is Not

It is helpful to begin by addressing a few common misconceptions.

• Multisensory instruction is not about learning styles. The point of a multisensory approach is not to match a student’s preferred modality, especially since it has not been proven that matching a preference correlates to how effectively a student learns.
• It is not a set of hands-on activities. Materials like sand, shaving cream, or manipulatives are not inherently instructional. If they are not directly tied to a specific learning goal, they function as activities rather than teaching.
• It is not engagement for its own sake. Movement and high energy do not guarantee learning. Students can be busy without forming strong connections between sounds, symbols, and meaning.
• It is not something added on top of a lesson. When treated as an extra component, it becomes difficult to sustain and easy to drop. This often signals that it has not yet been integrated into core instruction.

What Multisensory Instruction Is

Effective multisensory instruction involves the intentional use of multiple senses in service of a clearly defined learning goal.

This typically includes:

• Visual input: what students see, such as letters, words, and patterns
• Auditory input: what they hear and say, including sounds and explanations
• Kinesthetic input: how students move, such as tapping or skywriting
• Tactile input: what they feel through writing or handling materials

For example, when learning a letter–sound correspondence, a student might:

• Look at the letter
• Say the letter name and sound
• Trace or skywrite the letter while saying the sound
• Hear both themselves and the teacher

These coordinated experiences help strengthen memory. Students with dyslexia often benefit from increased repetition and stronger connections across modalities to support retention and retrieval.

Two guiding questions can help with planning:

• What do I want students to remember and be able to retrieve?
• How can I engage more than one sense at the same time to support that learning efficiently?

Principles of Seamless Multisensory Routines

Effective multisensory instruction does not require elaborate preparation. In fact, consistent and predictable routines are often more effective.

Strong routines tend to be:

• Closely aligned to a clear objective. Each step reinforces a specific skill, such as a sound, spelling pattern, or syllable type.
• Student-driven. The teacher introduces and models the routine, then students take on the active work of saying, writing, and responding.
• Consistent across lessons. When the routine stays the same, students can focus their attention on the content rather than the process.
• Efficient. These routines typically take seconds or a few minutes. Their effectiveness comes from repetition and mental effort, not duration.

If a multisensory component requires extensive preparation, reduces time spent reading and writing, or is difficult to sustain, it may not be serving its intended purpose.

What Seamless Multisensory Instruction Looks Like

Multisensory instruction can be embedded into structured literacy lessons in simple, repeatable ways.

Sound–Symbol Routines (Phoneme–Grapheme)

Goal: Strengthen connections between sounds and spellings.

A routine might include:

• Presenting a grapheme, such as “ck”
• Students looking at the grapheme
• Saying a keyword and sound
• Skywriting the grapheme while saying the sound
• Applying it in reading or spelling

This integrates visual, auditory, and motor elements in a focused way.

Simultaneous Oral Spelling (SOS)

Goal: Connect phonemic awareness, spelling, and writing.

A typical sequence:

• The teacher says a word
• Students repeat it
• They segment the sounds while tapping
• They write the word while saying letters or sounds
• They read the completed word and check it

This process links spoken language to print and reinforces attention to each sound.

Phonemic Awareness with Movement

Goal: Strengthen awareness of individual sounds.

Examples include:

• Tapping each sound on fingers
• Moving a token/chip/cube for each phoneme
• Substituting one sound by moving tokens

The movement is directly connected to the sounds and supports later work with print.

Articulatory Cues

Goal: Build awareness of how sounds are produced.

Examples include:

• Feeling the throat to distinguish voiced and unvoiced sounds
• Noticing tongue placement
• Connecting these observations to spelling patterns

Students see, feel, and produce the sound, which can support both decoding and spelling.

A Simple Check for Instructional Decisions

When planning or reflecting, consider:

• What specific skill am I targeting?
• How are students seeing, hearing, saying, and physically engaging with it?
• Does each step directly support the learning goal?
• Can students eventually carry out this routine independently?

Bringing It Into Daily Practice

For teachers and caregivers, the goal is not to redesign instruction around materials. It is to refine how instruction is delivered.

Start with one routine, such as a sound–symbol practice or a spelling procedure. Keep the steps simple and consistent. With repetition, students become more independent, and the routine requires less direction.

Over time, these practices build. Students come to expect that they will look, say, hear, and write as part of learning. This predictability reduces cognitive load and allows them to focus more fully on the skill itself.

Multisensory instruction does not replace other essential components of reading instruction. Students still need explicit teaching, guided practice, feedback, and opportunities to read and write connected text. Multisensory techniques are most effective when they support these priorities.