Multisensory Reading Activities You Can Do at Home This Summer

Multisensory reading activities teach letters and sounds using more than one sense at a time — sight, hearing, touch, and movement together. For kids who are learning to read differently, this kind of practice builds stronger, more lasting connections between sounds and letters than reading alone does.

Summer is actually one of the best times to try this at home. There's no homework pressure, no timed tests, no comparing yourself to classmates. It's just you, your child, and fifteen minutes of practice that doesn't feel like schoolwork.

Why does multisensory learning help kids with dyslexia?

When a child with dyslexia looks at the letter b and tries to remember its sound, one neural pathway is working. When that same child traces the letter in sand while saying its sound out loud, three or four pathways are activated at once. That simultaneous engagement is the idea behind multisensory instruction — the brain builds more routes to the same information, which makes it easier to retrieve later.

Research supported by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) has demonstrated that explicit, structured language instruction — including multisensory delivery — is especially effective for students with dyslexia. The International Dyslexia Association identifies multisensory teaching as one of the core delivery principles of structured literacy, the approach behind reading programs like Orton-Gillingham (O-G) that specialists use with kids who have reading differences.

The important caveat: multisensory activities work best when they're connected to a scope and sequence — the specific skills your child is working on right now. A sand tray is most useful if your child is practicing the short-a vowel sound, not just tracing random letters. If you're not sure where your child is in their phonics sequence, their teacher or reading specialist is the right person to ask.

Simple activities that work at home

You don't need any special materials. Most of what's below uses things you already have.

Sand or shaving cream writing. Fill a small tray or baking sheet with a thin layer of sand, salt, or shaving cream. Have your child trace a letter or word with their finger while saying the sound out loud. Sight, touch, and hearing are all engaged at once. This one is particularly effective for children who reverse letters like b and d, because the physical act of forming the letter creates a muscle-memory anchor that visual-only practice doesn't build.

Tap it out. Tapping is a simple kinesthetic technique borrowed directly from Orton-Gillingham instruction. When your child encounters a multi-syllable word, have them tap one finger to their palm for each syllable as they say it — "bas-ket-ball" gets three taps. For individual sounds within a word, they tap each sound separately: "cat" is three taps, one for each phoneme. This turns an abstract concept into something physical and countable.

Air writing. Ask your child to write a letter or word in the air with an extended arm and a large, sweeping motion — big enough that their shoulder, not just their wrist, is moving. Saying the letter or sound aloud while they write it adds the auditory layer. Air writing is useful precisely because the large motor movement is harder to reverse or confuse than fine-motor pencil writing on paper.

Letter tiles and word building. Physical letter tiles — foam, magnetic, or even cardboard cutouts — let children manipulate sounds by moving objects. To practice a word family, lay out the letters c, a, and t and say "cat." Then swap the first letter: "What word do we get if we change the /c/ to /b/?" Sliding a tile out and a new one in makes the logic of phonics visible and concrete.

Read aloud together. This one sounds simple, but the specifics matter. Sit beside your child — not across from them — so you're both looking at the same page in the same orientation. Track with your finger under the words as you read together, one line at a time. When your child comes to a word they don't know, resist the urge to supply it immediately. Give them 10 seconds to try. If they get stuck, help them break it into smaller parts: the beginning sound, then the middle, then the end. The article How to Read With Your Child Who Has Dyslexia covers this process in more depth.

What makes practice actually stick

The activities above are most effective when they're short, daily, and matched to your child's current level. Fifteen minutes of focused practice five days a week outperforms a two-hour Saturday session. That's true for all reading practice, but especially for kids who find reading effortful — shorter sessions mean less fatigue and less frustration, which means more willingness to try again tomorrow.

The other thing that matters is the material itself. Practice is most productive when your child can get most words right, with a handful of challenges. If they're getting almost everything wrong, the text is too hard. If everything is easy, there's no growth. The sweet spot is roughly 90–95% accuracy, with a few words to work through. Decodable books — texts written specifically to match the phonics patterns your child is learning — are designed to hit that target. The article What Are Decodable Books and Why Do They Matter? explains how to find and use them.

What to do next

Ask your child's teacher or reading specialist which phonics skills your child is currently working on — that's what summer practice should target. If your child is in a reading support program at school, ask if there are specific sound patterns or word families they should be reinforcing over the break.

Then pick one or two activities from the list above and try them for a week. You don't need to do all of them. Consistency with one approach is more valuable than variety for its own sake.

If you're not sure where your child's reading skills currently stand or which phonics patterns to focus on this summer, the Personalized Results Guide can help you map where they are and what would make the most useful practice right now.

Sources: National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), research on structured literacy and dyslexia instruction; International Dyslexia Association, Structured Literacy: Effective Instruction for Students with Dyslexia and Related Reading Difficulties (LD Online); Samuel Orton and Anna Gillingham, foundational multisensory instruction framework (1935), as described in Lawrence School, "Orton-Gillingham Multisensory Learning."