bumpybooks is a direct teaching manual for parents. It incorporates all the elements of multisensory teaching that are necessary for beginning readers Multisensory teaching is simultaneously visual, auditory, and kinesthetic/tactile to enhance memory and learning. Links are consistently made between the visual (what we see), auditory (what we hear) and kinesthetic/tactile (what we feel). This approach is used to link the sounds of the letters with the written symbol. Children also link the sound and symbol with how it feels to form the letter or letters. As students learn a new letter or pattern, they carefully trace the letter while saying the corresponding sound. Students use all three pathways to the brain for learning rather than focusing on a "sight-word" or memory method. See a sample page which illustrates this. Studies have shown that many early learners have weak visual and/or auditory memories, and for them the sense of touch becomes necessary to their memory function. Scientific research also suggests that repeated tactile sensations created by tracing on a textured surface produce impressions on the brain that never fully disappear. Research supported by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) supports the fact that all children in structured, sequential, multisensory programs that use direct explicit teaching of letter-sound relationships made significant gains in decoding skills. These studies showed similar results for a wide range of ages and abilities. Source: Marcia K. Henry PhD, International Dyslexia Association Bulletin