Introduction

The multisensory method of teaching babies to read involves using books, DVDs, PowerPoint slideshows and/or computer software to illustrate the meanings of words through multiple sensory channels – visual, auditory, and kinesthetic (including doing, touching, smelling and tasting).

Delivering information through several sensory channels is a powerful teaching method because it is easier to remember something we have experienced in a number of ways. Like the flash method, this type of teaching engages the right hemisphere of the brain (albeit in a different way). Unlike the left brain, which learns through logic and reasoning, the right brain learns through feeling, doing, and visualizing (pictures rather than words). This is why young children – who are right-brain dominant until the age of three and a half – instinctively try to touch and taste every object they come across.