2. Spice It Up Pump It Up Rev It Up AMP It Up Upping the Impact of Your VAKT Instruction Vicki Lockwood, MEd. and Kathy Ourand, MEd.

3. Our Objective… You will increase your bank of creative VAKT strategies in order to enhance your reading instruction and boost student engagement by simultaneously addressing multiple memory paths in the brain. Whew!

4. Validating Technicalities… AKA Supporting Research Studies from the National Institutes of Child Health and Human Development have shown that a multisensory teaching method is the most effective approach to teaching, particularly for children with difficulties learning to read, as multiple memory paths in the brain are simultaneously stimulated. We will apply that method to… The studies that show there is a wide consensus about what comprises the elements of effective reading instruction (e.g., National Reading Panel, 2000; Rayner, Foorman, Perfetti, Pesetsky, Seidenberg, 2001; Snow, Burns, Griffin, 1998). With an element focus on … The elements are the same, whether the focus is prevention or intervention and include: phonemic awareness, alphabetic knowledge and decoding skills, fluency in word recognition and text processing, vocabulary and comprehension (Foorman,Torgesen, 2001).

5. A Little Sidebar… When we think of VAKT we often find our creativity does not limit us to just visual, auditory, kinesthetic, and tactile. Is VAKT vital? Absolutely! But, perhaps, not necessarily sufficient (or, shall we say, as memorable as it might be)! We make an effort to incorporate allsensory (our little poetic license play on the word multisensory) with VAKT to include simultaneous stimulation of as many of the senses as possible – not just seeing (visual), hearing (auditory), and touching (tactile) with movement (kinestetic) – but also including tasting and smelling when possible. Ahhh, that can be so much fun – and quite memorable! Ahhh, the smell of the ocean air, the taste of the salt, walking on the sand, the sound of the birds, rubbing on the SPF, the warmth of the sun… Huh? What? Oh, excuse me boys and girls! The next word? Vacation! Spell vacation. I had a memorable vacation.