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!)

Reading Interventions: Phonemic Awareness

We often had struggling readers in first grade who came to us with very limited pre-reading skills (concepts of print, phonological awareness, etc.). Our curriculum did not address their needs adequately, so the first grade team worked together with the speech and language therapist to come up with some interventions. This is what it looked like in my classroom:

At the beginning of the year, I grouped students into Guided Reading Groups based on their DIBELS scores and a brief running record (if applicable). I also used the Phonological Awareness Inventory (PAI) developed by my district (based on the Phonemic Awareness Hierarchy of Skills found below). Once I had my groups, I had a pretty good idea of who had the ability to begin guided reading and who needed work on pre-reading skills, specifically phonemic awareness. I used the PAI to determine where to start with the latter students.

Phonemic Awareness Hierarchy of Skills

1. Identifying Words in a Sentence (clap one time for each word in a sentence)
2. Identifying Syllables (clap one time for each syllable)
3. Identifying/recognizing Compound Words
4. Identifying Rhymes
5. Generating Rhymes
6. Blending (I say c-a-t, student can tell me “cat”)
7. Segmenting (I ask what are the sounds in cat, and student can tell me “c-a-t”
8. Phoneme Isolation (What is the first, middle, or end, sound you hear in “cat”)
9. Identifying letter sounds (What sound does this letter make?)

I created tabs for each of the above skills in a 3-ring binder, and then organized activities behind each tab, using ideas from the resources listed below.

Resources:
Auditory Processing Activities. Copyright 1991 by ECL Publications. www.eclpublications.com.

Irresistible Sound-matching sheets and Lessons That Build Phonemic Awareness, by J. Wagstaff. Copyright 2001 by Scholastic.

Phonemic Awareness in Young Children: A Classroom Curriculum, by Marilyn Jager Adams, Barbara R. Foorman, Ingvar Lundberg, and Terri Beeler. Copyright 1998 by Paul H. Brookes Publishing Co.

The Phonological Awareness Kit: Primary, by Carolyn Robertson and Wanda Salter. Copyright 1995 by Linguisystems. http://www.linguisystems.com/itemdetail.php?id=28#

Word Identification Strategies: Phonics from a New Perspective, by Barbara J. Fox. Copyright 2000 by Prentice Hall.

Each time I met with a group of students (2-5 in each group), I would spend no more than 10 minutes on 2 or 3 phonemic awareness activities. They were presented as “games” and done at a quick pace. I took brief notes (30 sec) after we finished. If I still had their attention after 10 minutes, we would do some work with a few sight words, work on concepts of print, or write a simple book together. The next day we would review the phonemic awareness activities from the day before, and if each student had mastered the skill, we would move on. If not, we would try other activities related to the same skill.

After nine months of focused work on phonemic awareness, collaboration with para-educators and special education teachers (in addition to regular classroom teaching), we could see much growth in each student! Those students who were especially motivated and had involved parents made even more progress. We saw several students excel in second grade, and a few that exited the special education program after another year of work. This was amazing, considering they were far behind their peers at the beginning of first grade.

Additional Notes:
It was not unusual to spend several months on Blending or Segmenting activities.

We didn't get stuck on the rhyming sections. Rhyming is not the only indicator of reading readiness, so after I introduced it and worked with it, we moved on.

I did not wait until the last step of the hierarchy to introduce phonics. Often, my para-ed would work on letter identification using flashcards and matching or BINGO games. We also worked on sight words throughout the year and created pattern books so the children were “reading” even as they worked on their pre-reading development.

Resources: Children's Books and Reading Programs

I was revisiting Esme Raji Codell's website today (author of Educating Esme, the spunky diary of a first-year teacher) and found some gems:

The Best New Children's Books
Esme reviews new children's books on her blog. She provides a wonderful range of fiction and nonfiction, picture books and chapter books, read-alouds and books for independent reading. In addition to the day's featured title, Esme includes books that you might enjoy that relate to it. For instance, in yesterday's post, she highlights Every Soul a Star by Wendy Mass, followed by several other "tweenage" books written by Mass and then a listing of realistic fiction appropriate for this age group.

Special Reading Programs (promoting the enjoyment of reading)
Here are several ideas for promoting reading in your school. Ranging from storytime breakfasts to weekly baking sessions to a book parade, they can be used as PTA-sponsored fundraisers, student body-sponsored activities, inspiration for an after-school class, or as the culminating activity for a school-wide literacy week.