Good Sensory Learning Blog

Making activities both game-like and multisensory helps to entice and engage young learners. There are simple facts that every student should commit to memory, and integrating color, tactile manipulatives and puzzle-like instructions can take these mundane tasks fabulously fun. Free, Multisensory, Learning Center Activity: How Many? I created this free activity to help my students learn some important facts. Each piece can be printed and laminated, and then students can put the image together and fill in the “blanks” using a dry erase marker with the correct information. The free attachment offers all the materials for you to do this...

Many students that struggle with auditory processing weaknesses can be irritating to teachers and family members because they just don't seem to pay attention or follow verbal directions.  In addition, when these struggling learners attempt to follow through with directives, they may miss sequence tasks, leave out steps altogether, or they may completely misunderstand or misinterpret what was said.  Many times they feel agitation and frustration in those around them, and this can exacerbate the problem. What Can Be Done to Help These Struggling Learners? Be patient and loving because increasing their anxiety level will only make their problems worse. ...

Recently, one of my students expressed some confusion about prepositions. I reached into my cabinet looking for manipulatives and pulled out a stress toy that included a rubber mouse and his block of Swiss cheese. I explained that a preposition was anything that the mouse could do to the Swiss cheese. We decided to call the mouse Pierre and had fun giving him his own “voice.” We placed him in various positions in relation to the cheese to explore the many types of prepositions and had a good belly laugh. To share our fun, we decided to create the following...

I think we are all familiar with the embarrassment of occasionally forgetting a person's name.  However, this is a common difficulty for individuals with dyslexia, and it is called a word retrieval or word finding difficulty. They may know someone's or something's name one day, but are unable to access the same information the next. What Causes One to Forget Names? There are four factors that can impact one's ability to encode and then retrieve a name.  Environmental Factors that impact the senses can pull one's attention away from a learning experience. Auditory distractions such as a noisy environment can make it...

There are a plethora of reading programs that walk students through the rules, patterns and irregularities of our complicated English language, however, many students need to begin their remedial instruction by strengthening the core and foundational cognitive skills required to be a competent reader. What Are the Core Cognitive Skills Required for Reading? There are three main cognitive skills that students must strengthen to prepare them to read. Although there are other cognitive processing areas that the brain uses to read, such as executive functioning, spatial skills, and processing speed, here is a list and discussion of the primary ones:...