6 Highly Effective Strategies for Teaching Visual Learners to Read

Sarah Major, M.Ed. is passionate about working in harmony with a child's immaculate design to support their learning strengths. As a Title 1 Program Director and Designer, Sarah earned awards for creating her own multisensory educational resources that have now been sold in all 50 states and over 150 countries. By design, Sarah’s approach targets multiple pathways to the brain, empowering visual learners to move past memorization, fostering learning that is rapid and effortless.   

There are different kinds of "smart" & different ways of learning

We know that there are many types of learners, and that there are multiple pathways to the brain, so why do we teach all children in the same way? (Fleming, N.D 1995, I'm different; not dumb.) All children don't learn to read in the same way. What works fine for some, does not work at all with others. The discussion about teaching phonics or not misses the heart of the problem. Of course children need to learn phonics! The real issue is HOW we teach children to read. There are ways of teaching that create a flash of understanding in the child's mind, an ease of learning, an indelible memory created. Imagine what would happen, how our students' experience in school would be transformed, if we prioritized facilitating this "ease of learning."

Traditional reading lessons are perfect for one kind of learner

When we teach reading in the traditional way, we:

1. Teach children their letter names (ay, be, see, dee), a corresponding sound (ay says "a," as in "apple")
2. Teach kids how to put those symbols in a correct sequence (abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz), (so far we are memorizing still, right?)
3. Add some rules for decoding (i before e except after c, most of the time)
4. Memorize sight words (words that appear most frequently in all texts for children)
5. Add to this the expectation that children will successfully memorize endless sequences of letters (spelling) which they will use correctly in their writing

This is a very detail-driven, sequential way of teaching and it doesn't work for over half our kids.

What happens when we teach reading this way?

A quick glance around a typical school will show us the results of teaching all children this same way. In every classroom, there are a handful of children who just absorb the details as though through their pores. These are the children who can see a word once and just remember it. They would learn to read if you stuck them in a paper bag with a stack of books. They would figure out the pattern and the code for reading. 

Another group of children work at learning to read and do ok with it, but many of them do not enjoy reading, and many don't understand what they are reading because they are so focused on the tasks of decoding to focus on meaning.

Yet another group of children lags behind the rest, begins to struggle, and then fail in any discipline that requires reading. 

The final group of children just don't make it. A lot of testing and sorting later, children are identified and named by the skills they do not acquire, and they are often removed from the regular classroom and put into small groups, where intensive efforts commence to help them learn to read using the same methods they were unsuccessful with before.

The primary strategy that does not work is memorization

If you give the child's brain what it likes, learning will follow

6 High-yielding teaching practices

1. Use visuals

Use visuals integrated into symbols in order to access the visual cortex (totally powerful and effective for most children and always for visual/spatial learners). Visuals with symbols embedded in them are "snapped" like a photo and are recalled intact later. Here is an example of a sight word embedded in a visual. Because the word and visual are integrated, when the child sees the plain word later, their mind will retrieve the word complete with an image.

Sight Words

The accompanying jingle provides a rhythmic hook for memory for those children who learn best via rhyme and verse. Fronts of cards show the word embedded in an image, while the backs show the plain word in the same font, include a body motion to accompany the word, and finish with the word used correctly in a sentence, which will aid in comprehension.

The alphabet can be taught by embedding visuals with the letters. The mountains not only relate the shape of the letter M to a known object, but also provides a visual reminder of the shape of the letter. Same goes for the letter F. It is the shape of a flag, which automatically reminds the child of the shape of the letter, as well as the sound.

Alphabet Teaching Cards

2. Use stories

Use stories along with visuals to convey ideas we want the children to learn. Instead of memorizing letters and their sounds, we use Alphabet Tales, a full-color book of stories that explain exactly why each letter came to be formed as it is. Once children hear the story and see the visuals, they do not forget. 

3. Use body motion 

Use body motions along with visuals and stories to engage the cerebellum as frequently as possible. The sight words and alphabet also rely heavily on body motions, which help those very kinesthetic learners store and retrieve  information. Here are body motions for the vowels

4. Use fingermapping

help children correctly sequence sounds in a word as they are writing. Helping children SEE the sequence of sounds/letters makes them able to correctly write the word. They will not leave out letters, use incorrect letters, nor reverse letters. Fingermapping to these children is as powerful as seeing a visual map is to people who simply cannot recall verbal directions to a new location.

Specific directions for using fingermapping can be found in The Illustrated Book of Sounds & Their Spelling Patterns.

5. Use whiteboards and markers

Use of whiteboards rather than pencil and paper is pretty self-explanatory. Some children don't mind using pencil and paper, but for those who struggle with fine motor skills, whiteboards and markers are wonderful. Every day while in the classroom, I spent 15-20 minutes with the class on the rug in front of me teaching the new concept for the day in reading or math.

Everything I taught them, they wrote. For kids who are visual, tactile, or kinesthetic, writing is a must. Our practice was for me to say the word we were discussing, sound the word out together (auditory), then while the kids sounded the word again, they wrote each sound on their board (tactile). 

6. Teach using patterns. 

For many children, just remembering a detail about how a particular word is spelled is nearly impossible. If you teach a particular sound spelling such as AY, don't teach it using one word in isolation. Generate a whole list of words containing that sound spelling and then have your children sound and write them on their whiteboards as you lead them through that exercise.

One of the hardest concepts for struggling readers to grasp is that a specific sequence of letters doesn't always sound the same. Lessons are done for you in The Illustrated Book of Sounds & Their Spelling Patterns.

Here is a chart that shows all the ways to spell the long A sound.

It helps visual learners to see the target sound spellings in a different color from the other letters in the word. In this lesson, every time children see orange, they will say the long sound of A. Easy peasy! 

And Here are Sound Spelling Teaching Cards for long A spellings

 Our products were designed to be easily understood by your right-brained learner!  Learn more about our systematic phonics program that includes these resources here: Right-Brained Phonics & Spelling kit

These six strategies are proven to be successful! Children understand and retain the information when it is taught in a way that matches their learning style. We have done the hard work for you and incorporated these six strategies into all of our resources so that all you need to do is open them up and start! We created reading, math, sight words and alphabet resources specifically for visual learners.