#12 –Technology across the senses

Howard Gardner’s multiple intelligences shed much light about my own capacity of learning, which is how I learn. During my freshmen year of my undergraduate degree program, I was challenged to learn how I learn. I was given a test that helped me to best identify it. Although the test, as far as I remember, did not mention Howard Gardner, but his principles such as the multiple intelligences were used to test the capacity in which a person learns best. From the results, I discovered that I learned best from doing this or having hands-on instruction. This multiple intelligence was kinesthetic. That was over five years ago. My second highest intelligence score was visual. I have changed as most people do, and throughout my undergraduate program I became more of a visual learner than a kinesthetic learner. If I saw it I could relate and process the information. I no longer majorly relied on the former intelligence of kinesthetic. I adapted to one of the highly traditional ways that universities teach now, which was through PowerPoint presentations and handouts. I became visual and connected the lectures (I scored poorly on verbal) to the visual text to learn at a pace that was most comprehensible for me.

I teach best using the intelligences of verbal and visual, and in some cases kinesthetic. I teach first grade and this is the grade where my students are really grasping phonics concepts because they are jumpstarting into becoming readers. I use a lot of writing and visuals to help them to connect with the text. But, to become good readers students need to be both phonemically aware (aware the words are made up of letters) and phonologically aware (aware that words and letters have sounds). Students must first be phonologically aware before phonemically aware. Therefore a lot of my teaching in reading has a lot to do with me saying, stretching, and sounding out words. Next, I connect what students hear to text. I write the letters and words that they hear for them to see and sound out. Teaching reading to first graders has challenged me to become a better auditory learner, because I have to pay attention to what I say and listen for specific things that students say. I use my kinesthetic abilities in mathematics because students need to experience firsthand the mathematical calculations and how they come about for them to understand.

Lesson plan objective:

The learner will listen for the sounds in various words, observe the strategies in blending words, and apply listening and sounding out techniques to decode words.

Verbal/Linguistic	Leapfrog Alphabet/Phonics Pad	http://www.starfall.com-/ Learn to read-links 1 through 5
Logical/ Mathematical	www.storyit.com/wgames/wgames.htm	www.readwritethink.org/Materials/Wordfamily/
Visual/Spatial	Jumpstart for First Grade	www.pbskids.org Word world
Bodily/Kinesthetic	http://www.starfall.com/ Learn to read links 1-5	www.pbskids.org Super why -sounds bingo
Musical/Rhythmic	Phonics CD with songs that sing the various sounds of the alphabet such as ABC rap	Rock and Learn: Songs for Phonics
Intrapersonal	Leapfrog Alphabet/Phonics Pad	www.pbskids.org Word world
Interpersonal	www.pbskids.org Super why-sounds bingo	www.pbskids.org Super why- freeze dancing rhyming
Naturalist	Plastic container	Sandwich bag
Existentialist	simulations	Recorded Reader’s theatre story