When you think back to how you learned best as a child, what comes to mind? Maybe you needed to see it written down, hear someone explain it out loud, or even do it yourself to truly understand.
That’s the heart of multisensory instruction: engaging more than one sense at a time to strengthen learning.
In the Orton-Gillingham (OG) approach to teaching reading, it’s not just a helpful strategy. It’s essential.
Multisensory instruction is a teaching method that activates multiple senses. These typically include visual (sight), auditory (hearing), tactile (touch), and kinesthetic (movement) senses. For students with dyslexia, who often struggle with traditional reading methods, this approach builds stronger neural connections and makes learning more concrete and memorable.
Think of it like building a bridge: the more supports you have underneath, the stronger the structure. Multisensory instruction offers those extra supports.
In a Roberts Academy classroom, multisensory elements are woven into every part of the lesson. It’s not a one-time activity. It’s a way of thinking about how students learn.
Here are a few ways our teachers bring multisensory instruction to life:
By combining these inputs, students engage their brains in multiple ways, which leads to deeper understanding and stronger retention.
Dyslexia affects how the brain processes written language. Traditional teaching methods often rely heavily on visual input, such as silent reading or copying from the board; these methods don’t always work for students with dyslexia.
Multisensory instruction offers a different path. It creates multiple entry points into the same information. If a student struggles to remember a letter just by looking at it, they might recall the shape by feeling it traced in sand, saying its sound, or writing it in the air while speaking aloud.
Multisensory instruction gives students more ways to connect with the material. That leads to increased confidence, engagement, and long-term success.
Absolutely. While it is especially effective for students with dyslexia, multisensory instruction benefits all students. Engaging more than one sense helps students stay focused, deepen understanding, and retain information longer.
Many students, whether they struggle with reading or not, enjoy the interactive and movement-based nature of this approach.
Multisensory instruction is a cornerstone of the Orton-Gillingham approach because it works. By helping students see, hear, feel, and move through their learning, it makes reading more accessible and meaningful.
Whether you are a parent exploring reading support for your child or an educator looking for evidence-based strategies, multisensory instruction is worth understanding. It changes how students learn to read, and more importantly, how they feel about reading.
Want to see what multisensory instruction looks like in action? Reach out to Roberts Academy or follow along as we share more about what makes structured literacy so effective.
At Roberts Academy, multisensory instruction is at the heart of everything we do. As Georgia’s only school for dyslexic learners in grades 2 through 6 outside of Metro Atlanta, we provide daily, individualized instruction that is structured, sequential, systematic, prescriptive, and multisensory.
Our students thrive in a learning environment designed specifically for the way their brains learn best: through seeing, hearing, touching, and moving.
To learn more about Roberts Academy, visit our website or schedule a tour.
Discover Roberts Academy at Mercer University in Macon, Georgia!