3.3: Multisensory approaches

Before examining some multisensory approaches which can be applied to the teaching of reading, spelling and writing, let us remember that there are two essential abilities that the children need to have grasped first in order to learn to read and spell:

  • 1. They need to develop phonemic awareness, i.e. to realise that words can be analyzed into smaller units of ‘sounds’ (namely phonemes)
  • 2. They need to grasp the alphabetic principle, i.e. to realise that the letters on the page correspond to these small units of ‘sounds’