Our Brain & Senses Work Together to Learn
Multisensory Learning
Hearing, seeing, tasting, smelling and feeling are the ways the brain receives information about the world. Multisensory instruction is a way of teaching that engages more than one sense at a time. When students learn something using more than one sense, the information is more likely to stick. The result is better memory of the skill. Multisensory learning can be particularly helpful for students who learn and think differently. Overall, multisensory instruction takes into account that individuals learn in different ways.
At The Listening Connection, we view case history, our observations, formal assessments and any previous evaluations through this learning modality lens. It is the best way to clearly see a child's strengths. We can then also see which learning modality skills need support. Skills that need support are a focus of initial sessions at The Listening Connection or your child may be referred to another specialist who is better suited to address those needs. These skills typically need to be strong to allow high level learning such as reading to effectively happen.
Auditory Skills:
Our Speciality
At The Listening Connection, we take a bottom-up approach to auditory processing and learning. We start at the ear, work our way up the auditory pathway in the brainstem and ending at the brain. Auditory processing simply is what the brain does with what is heard. Even when the peripheral hearing is completely normal, the brain can still struggle to process auditory information in an effective way. Our test battery examines which specific areas of the auditory processing pathway may be causing breakdowns or challenges. Should testing reveal concerns, a plan to target those weaker auditory and phonemic processing abilities can be created. Higher level skills such as learning to decode (read) and encode (spelling) will then be the focus of intervention if needed.
Phonemic Skills
Phonemic awareness, or the ability to hear, identify and manipulate the sounds or individual phonemes in the English language, is one of the strongest, if not the strongest, predictor of reading ability.
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We include phonemic awareness and synthesis abilities in our test battery and intervention. If needed, sessions will focus on phonemic synthesis and ultimately phonemic manipulation proficiency.
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Reading is an invention...
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Humans are hardwired to speak and will learn this skill by simply being exposed to language, but reading is a cultural invention that must be implicitly and specifically taught. Some brains are naturally wired to read and will easily acquire the skills of reading and writing. Yet other brains are wired differently and will not use the best neural pathways for the task of reading. Most of the top neuroscientists and researchers, like Dr. Sally Shaywitz, believe that those neural pathways can be re-directed to the proper phonemic and language centers of the brain. Such intervention should provide explicit, prescriptive and multisensory instruction.