Teachers are often missing one simple key to their phonics lesson: visuals. You need to include visual instruction when planning your systematic and explicit phonics lessons. Visuals are essential to multi-sensory learning, and effective lessons will always start with some phonics type of visual reference. This is probably the simplest piece of planning your phonics lesson, so let's talk about 2 simple ways to incorporate visuals in a multi-sensory phonics lesson.
Visual learning is the type of instruction that focuses on the sense of sight. With visual learning, students use images, graphics, and colors to interpret information. You can also use visualization (ie closing their eyes and picturing something) as a form of visual learning. Colorful illustrations, graphic organizers, and flashcards are often used in the classroom to meet this piece of multi-sensory instruction.
In addition to using visuals during your lesson, you should also display them. Close your eyes and picture your own classroom. In your classroom, you might see posters, an alphabet or number line, and lots of colorful images. Your entire classroom can be used as a visual aid for your students! That's why it's important that you design and decorate your own classroom with what your students are learning in mind. One area I had was a focus wall, where I displayed what we were learning for that week and any skills that we were currently practicing. I taught my students to use the classroom walls to help them while learning. For example, they would use the sound cards to figure out what sound they were hearing in a word when they were trying to spell.
My favorite way to incorporate visuals in multi-sensory phonics lessons is to create an anchor chart with my students. You can use any type of graphic organizer as an anchor chart to complete with your students. For example, if you are learning about the digraph /sh/, you can create a circle map with your students using an anchor chart. Give students a minute to think of as many words they can that start with the /sh/ sound. Call on students to tell you a word and draw or write the word onto the anchor chart.
You can continue to add to the anchor chart throughout the week and display it in your classroom. I liked to challenge my students to “be on the lookout” for more words that started with the sound we were working on for that week. Every morning, I would have students excited to share a word that they found at home or while reading to add to our weekly anchor chart. I used these anchor chart lessons as my Monday phonics lesson every week! You can find an entire year of pre-made phonics anchor charts available here: Phonics Anchor Charts
(Find it on TPT here)
Another important piece to my phonics routine is a phonemic awareness warm-up lesson. The first part of our daily phonemic awareness warm-up is a “Flash Practice” where we practice sounds using sound cards or letter flashcards. These sound cards also show a mouth placement to focus on what your mouth should look like when making each sound. You can find these Phonics Sound Cards and Posters here.
Using visual aids in your phonics lesson is a simple way to utilize multi-sensory instruction every day. Which visual do you plan on adding to your phonics lesson?
