How the SMI Method Can Help Your Child's Memory Problem

Over and over we hear from frustrated parents and teachers: My child can’t remember anything I’m teaching. There’s something wrong with his memory.

The problem might not be your child’s memory—it might be the way you’re teaching.

Spelling and reading are typically taught through the visual pathway, ignoring the other major pathways to the brain. If your child is a certain type of visual learner, that probably works out really well for him. But if your child is an auditory or kinesthetic (hands-on learner), typical lessons may not be going as well, unless your child is an intuitive learner who just figures out the logic of English on his own.

To understand why, let’s look at where learning begins.

It might seem that learning begins with the brain...but it doesn’t. Learning actually begins with your senses: sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste. When we teach reading and spelling, the senses we can engage are sight, sound, and touch.

Think of your eyes, ears, and hands as information receptors for your brain.

Your senses gather information and send it to your brain for processing. Your brain decides whether to pay attention to the information, and if it does, the information is stored in your short-term memory for further processing. The more receptors you involve, the better chance that the information will be retained by the brain.

You probably have one pathway to the brain that is stronger than the others. You may be a strong visual learner, or maybe you learn best through hearing or doing. It makes sense to learn through your strongest pathway to the brain, because your brain will pay more attention and retain more information that way.

With young children, it isn’t always clear which pathway is the strongest. Kids mature and experiment, and some children just don’t have a really prominent preference. It might be totally obvious that one child is a hands-on learner, while the learning preference of another child may not be obvious at all, especially if, for example, the child's strengths are split between auditory and visual. But as you’ll find out in a second, you don't really need to be able to identify your child’s strongest pathway to learning.

When children are taught using all three pathways to the brain—the visual, the auditory, and the kinesthetic—they learn even more than when they are taught only through their strongest pathway (Farkus, 2003). The more senses we involve, the more learning occurs. So even if your child is an auditory learner, it is still important to teach through all three pathways. By doing so, not only will you be sure to teach to your child’s strongest pathway, but you will also enable maximum long-term retention of the information by engaging the other pathways.

And here’s something else to be aware of:

Your personal learning style probably influences the way you prefer to teach.  

For example, if you are an auditory learner, you may tend to present your lessons using auditory methods. You may choose curriculum based on your own learning preferences, or you may overlook parts of the lessons that you personally don’t care for—but which may be perfect for your child.
You may not even realize that you are doing it. But if your child is highly visual—and you teach using an auditory approach—your teaching will miss the boat for that particular child. Your visual child needs to see demonstrations of the reading or spelling concepts, but you may skip those in favor of having your child concentrate on auditory blending exercises or discussions of main points.

The real power comes when you combine all three pathways simultaneously with the SMI Method.

Multisensory teaching is a big improvement over teaching through one pathway to the brain, but the real power comes when you combine all three pathways with simultaneous multisensory instruction—the SMI method. 

With the SMI method, you combine all three pathways to the brain simultaneously. SMI is powerful because, as neuroscientists say, “brain neurons that fire together, wire together” (Sousa, 2006). When we teach using multiple senses simultaneously, the neurons in the respective parts of the brain fire at the same time and wire together to create neural networks. These neural networks allow the brain to store and retrieve information much more effectively and efficiently.

To show you how the SMI method is used in a practical sense, here’s an example from the All About Spelling program: when the student learns a new phonogram, he writes the letter or letter combination as he says the sound. This simple activity simultaneously engages the visual, auditory, and kinesthetic pathways to the brain, which helps the new learning really stick.

Here’s another example of the SMI method, this time from the All About Reading program: when blending, the child touches one phonogram tile a time, saying the sound as he touches the tile. Again, this simple activity simultaneously engages the visual (seeing the phonogram), auditory (saying the sound), and kinesthetic (touching just one tile at a time). This activity reinforces the skills of directionality, phonics, and blending, and leads to long-term retention.

Be prepared to see your child’s memory problem improve dramatically.

After you use these multisensory methods with your child, you will never want to go back to standard teaching. You will get hooked on seeing results and on having your hard work pay off. You might even forget that you once thought your child had a memory problem, because you finally found a way to make the information stick in your child’s brain.

That’s the power of multisensory teaching and the SMI method!

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Farkus, R.D. (2003). “Effects of traditional versus learning-styles instructional methods on middle school students,” The Journal of Educational Research 97 (1).
Sousa, D.A. (2006). How the brain learns. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.