Multi-Sensory Instruction in Math for Special Education (2024)

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Strategies to Build Math Skills for Students with Disabilities

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By

Jerry Webster

Jerry Webster

Special Education Expert

  • M.Ed., Special Education, West Chester University
  • B.A., Elementary Education, University of Pittsburgh

Jerry Webster, M.Ed., has over twenty years of experience teaching in special education classrooms. He holds a post-baccalaureate certificate from Penn State's Educating Individuals with Autism program.

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Updated on March 12, 2018

For some students with specific learning disabilities in reading, Math may actually provide a bright space, a place where they can compete with their typical or general education peers. For others, they have difficulty with the layers of abstraction they are required to understand and use before they get to the "right answer."

Providing lots and lots of structured practice with manipulates will help the student build understanding for the many abstractions they need to understand in order to succeed at the higher level math they will begin to see as early as third grade.

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Counting and Cardinality for Pre-School

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Building a sound foundation for understanding counting is critical for students to succeed in both functional and more abstract math. Children need to understand one to one correspondence, as well as a number line. This article provides lots of ideas to help support emerging mathematicians.

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Counting Muffin Tins - A Kitchen Pan Teaches Counting

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Counters and muffin tins together can give students lots of informal practice in counting in self-contained classrooms. Muffin tin counting is a great activity both for children who need practice at counting, but also for students who need academic activities they can complete independently.

Read MoreMathematics for Special Education: Skills for Primary GradesBy Jerry Webster

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Counting Nickels With a Number Line

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A number line is one way to help students understand operations (addition and subtraction) as well as counting and skip counting. Here's a skip counting pdf you can print and use with emerging coin counters.

Teaching Money for Special Education

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Often students can successfully count single denomination coins because they understand skip counting by fives or tens, but mixed coins create a much bigger challenge. Using a hundred chart helps students visualize coin-counting when they place coins on the hundred chart. Starting with the largest coins (you may want to have them use a whiteboard marker for 25, 50, and 75 for your quarters) and then moving to smaller coins, students can practice counting up while solidifying strong coin counting skills.​

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Hundred Charts Teach Skip Counting and Place Value

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This free printable hundred chart can be used for lots of activities, from skip counting to learning place value. Laminate them, and they can be used for skip counting in order to help students understand multiplication (color 4's one color, 8's over the top of them, etc.) as children will begin to see the patterns underlying those multiplication charts.

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Using a Hundred Chart to Teach Tens and Ones

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Understanding place value is critical for future success with operations, especially when students begin to approach regrouping for addition and subtraction. Using ten rods and ones blocks can help student transfer what they know from counting to visualizing tens and ones. You can expand building the numbers on the hundred chart to doing addition and subtraction with tens and ones, placing the tens and ones and "trading" ten ones cubes for rods.

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Place Value and Decimals

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By third grade, students have moved on to three and four-digit numbers, and need to be able to hear and write numbers through thousands. By printing and laminating this chart, you can give students lots of practice writing those numbers, as well as decimals. It helps students visualize the numbers as they write them.

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Games to Support Skills for Children with Disabilities

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Students with disabilities need lots of practice, but paper and pencil are daunting, if not outright aversive. Games create opportunities for students to practice math skills, interact appropriately in a social way and build relationships as they build skills.

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Your Citation

Webster, Jerry. "Multi-Sensory Instruction in Math for Special Education." ThoughtCo, Apr. 5, 2023, thoughtco.com/math-multi-sensory-instruction-special-education-3111035.Webster, Jerry. (2023, April 5). Multi-Sensory Instruction in Math for Special Education. Retrieved from https://www.thoughtco.com/math-multi-sensory-instruction-special-education-3111035Webster, Jerry. "Multi-Sensory Instruction in Math for Special Education." ThoughtCo. https://www.thoughtco.com/math-multi-sensory-instruction-special-education-3111035 (accessed March 28, 2024).

Multi-Sensory Instruction in Math for Special Education (2024)

FAQs

Multi-Sensory Instruction in Math for Special Education? ›

Multi-sensory teaching approaches involve the use of various senses, such as sight, sound, touch, and movement, to engage students in learning. By doing so, these strategies help students build stronger connections to the material, making it more accessible and easier to remember.

What is the multi-sensory approach in special education? ›

Multi-sensory teaching approaches involve the use of various senses, such as sight, sound, touch, and movement, to engage students in learning. By doing so, these strategies help students build stronger connections to the material, making it more accessible and easier to remember.

What is the multi-sensory approach to learning numbers? ›

Multisensory Learning Activities For Teaching Students

Use colorful counters or blocks to help children visualize and understand the concept of counting. They can group the objects, separate them, or arrange them in different patterns to develop their counting skills.

What might be an example of providing multi-sensory approaches in teaching? ›

Kids might have the chance to visually examine, touch, smell, and taste apples — instead of just reading and listening to their teacher speak about how they grow. Then they might hold a halved apple and count the number of seeds inside, one by one. That's multisensory teaching.

What is multisensory approach with reference to inclusive education? ›

What is Multisensory Learning? Multisensory learning is a teaching method that helps learners to learn using more than one sense i.e. visual, auditory, kinesthetic and tactile sense. It is an effective method that ensures inclusive learning and teaching.

What is the importance of multisensory teaching in inclusive education? ›

By engaging multiple senses simultaneously, students with diverse learning profiles can reinforce their understanding and memory of the material. Differentiated Instruction: Multisensory teaching embraces differentiated instruction, which involves tailoring instruction to meet the individual needs of students.

What are the 4 components of multisensory instruction? ›

Multisensory instruction uses multiple sensory pathways to enhance learning. This usually means that activities include visual (seeing), auditory (hearing), kinesthetic (moving), and tactile (touching) elements.

What are the 4 different approach of multisensory? ›

In essence, a multisensory approach incorporates the learning styles for visual, auditory, kinesthetic, and tactile learners. This approach doesn't 6 Page 7 5 single out a specific learning style for a specific student.

What is multisensory instruction for dyslexic students? ›

Dyslexic children typically have difficulty absorbing new information, especially if it is abstract or involves memorizing sequences or steps. Multisensory teaching techniques help break down these barriers to learning by making the abstract more concrete, turning lists or sequences into movements, sights and sounds.

Why multisensory for dyslexia? ›

Multisensory learning (MSL) helps an individual learn by using more than one sense. For children with dyslexia, the use of the visual, auditory, kinesthetic, and tactile modalities can be very helpful. A major component of the Orton Gillingham Approach is that it must be multisensory.

How would a teacher include multi sensory instruction across content areas? ›

Include two or three of these multi-sensory activities in each lesson: speaking, listening, moving, touching, reading, and writing. They fully engage the brain and make learning more memorable. These activities can be fun games or part of a daily practice routine.

How did multisensory instruction support student learning? ›

Multisensory activities are based in whole brain learning, which is the belief that the best way to teach concepts is by involving multiple areas in the brain. By adding auditory or visual components to reading assignments, like illustrations or online activities, you can help students develop stronger literacy skills.

What is the purpose of multi-sensory learning? ›

The main benefit of multisensory learning is that it helps children to retain more information. The key to effective multisensory teaching, is incorporating a range of sensory experiences when planning a lesson in order to ensure that each child is engaged and able to access the learning in a way that suits them.

What is the multi-sensory design approach? ›

Multi-sensory design refers to the intentional design approach that engages multiple senses to create immersive and meaningful experiences. It involves considering not only visual elements but also auditory, tactile, olfactory, and gustatory elements to evoke emotions, enhance engagement, and improve user experiences.

What are the two objectives of multisensory approach? ›

A multisensory approach to talking, hearing, visualizing, and taking action can stimulate learning and skills acquisition, while at the same time provide more immediate experiences with benefits of treatment. This helps create incentives and increases the likelihood of utilizing longer-term therapeutic strategies.

What is the value of a multi-sensory approach? ›

They fully engage the brain and make learning more memorable. These activities can be fun games or part of a daily practice routine. Multi-sensory activities are the scaffold for early practice. As students become proficient in the new skill or concept, reduce and then remove the multi-sensory scaffolds.

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