Teaching the Kinesthetic Learner

I just read a post from a friend who is homeschooling her kids, one of whom is a kinesthetic learner. She asked for ideas on how to help him with reading and writing. A couple of thoughts came to mind...

Sandpaper Letters - These are a Montessori resource designed to help young kids learn the shapes of letters. By tracing the letters with their fingers, they can learn how to form the letter in the correct fashion when they are ready to write. You can create your own or order them online. I suspect you could use them as you would any letter flashcards, playing Memory or Go Fish, putting letters together to spell words, and so forth.

Beads and Cubes - We used beads strung on a short string to work on blending CVC words in my first-grade classroom. Snap cubes work just as well, with students sounding out each letter separately and then snapping the cubes together as they blend the sounds into a word. The colors are visual cues for talking about beginning, middle, and ending sounds.

Word Sorts are great for building sight word vocabulary, talking about parts of speech, and learning spelling rules. You can find books of word sorts or make your own. I usually typed my own, using a piece of paper divided into 16-20 spaces. We sorted for nouns, short vowel sounds, words with "c" followed by "i" or "e," and so on. Usually we used only two types of words in a sort (for a noun sort, we would sort between nouns and verbs; for short vowel sounds, we would use CVC and CVCe words like "hot" and "poke").

Oral Retells are great for building and assessing reading comprehension and vocabulary. Students can retell any story using flannelgraph, simply drawn pictures, or photocopies of the illustrations.

Writing Non-Fiction can be done as a collaborative activity between student(s) and teacher. One year my class researched penguins. Students dictated sentences to me about what they had learned, and together (as a class) we organized the facts into categories and then into a logical sequence to create our own Book About Penguins. They then illustrated the pages and, after so much work with the text, were able to read and re-read the completed class book together.

Sight Word Flash Cards were also a big hit with my first graders, as they tried to read them as fast as they could. I would divide a handful of cards between two students and they would take turns showing the cards and reading them. The person who read all the cards shown to them first would "win." (For this to work, students were ability grouped and given only enough cards to provide a challenge without too much frustration.)

Reading independently can be made more "fun" by using pointer sticks or any creative pointing "tool." (Of course, the best motivator is having books at one's interest level that are not overly difficult to read!)