What is Multisensory Intensive Phonics?

Why I Left the High School Classroom

A few people have wondered why I made the move from teaching high school English and Theatre Arts to working in reading recovery with elementary students.

On paper, it looks like a step backward—away from Shakespeare, rhetoric, and performance, toward phonograms and decoding drills. In truth, it was a step closer to the heart of the problem I had been hearing for years.

“I Don’t Know That Word”

As a high school English teacher, there was one sentence that made me wince every time I heard it:

“I don’t know that word.”

Not because the word was advanced. Not because the student was careless. But because, more often than not, it revealed something deeper: the student had never been properly taught how to read.

If a student must stop and consciously puzzle through a word on the page, there is no mental space left for meaning. Reading becomes labor instead of thought. Decoding crowds out comprehension. And literature—rich, layered, demanding literature never gets a fair chance.

I began to realize that by the time students reached my classroom, many of the foundational decisions had already been made for them.

Automaticity Is Freedom

When phonics instruction is done well—and done early—reading becomes nearly subconscious. The brain no longer struggles to identify words; it recognizes patterns automatically, the way a musician reads notes or a driver reads road signs.

Take something as simple as the phonogram A. It has multiple sounds—cat, bake, wasp—and when all of these are taught from the beginning, the brain stores them together, not as contradictions but as variations within a system.

This matters.

Because when decoding is automatic, the mind is finally free to do what reading is meant to do: think, question, imagine, evaluate.

Don’t we need more thinkers?

English Looks Chaotic—Until It Doesn’t

The English language is famously intimidating. It contains more than 500,000 words. Teaching children to memorize words one by one is not only inefficient—it is impossible.

But English is not random.

At its core are approximately forty-five sounds, represented by about seventy basic phonograms. With these alone, students can decode the thousand most frequently used words in the language. Add a manageable set of spelling rules and a handful of advanced phonograms, and the system begins to reveal its logic. English, when taught correctly, is not a guessing game. It is a structure.

A Proven Method—Strangely Withheld

This systematic, multi-sensory approach to reading—taught without pictures, gimmicks, or cueing strategies—has a long and successful history. Yet today, it is often reserved only for students who have already failed.

Too often, a child must struggle for years, receive a diagnosis, and fall behind socially and academically before being granted access to what we already know works.

I believe every child deserves the best instruction from the beginning, not as a last resort.

What could be more important?

Old Wisdom, New Buzzwords

Many families will recognize this approach under different names: Orton-Gillingham-based programs, traditional phonogram instruction, or structured literacy. Most recently, public education has rediscovered these ideas under the banner of “The Science of Reading.” Despite the new label, this is largely a return to methods that were once standard—and quietly set aside.Progress, it seems, sometimes looks like remembering.

Why I Chose This Path

As a tutor and classroom interventionist, I most often use Spell to Write and Read. It is the program in which I was trained and the one I used with my own children.

It is not flashy. It is not scripted. And it requires the teacher to think.

But it is flexible, thorough, and remarkably cost-effective. For a modest investment, families receive a complete, non-consumable language arts foundation that grows with the child.

Other programs offer more hand-holding and convenience, but at a significantly higher cost. Each family must weigh those trade-offs. For me, depth and adaptability matter most.

Why This Matters—All the Way to High School

If all children were taught to read this way in the early years, nearly no student would reach high school staring at a page and saying, “I don’t know that word.”

They would know how to approach it. They would trust the system. And they would read—not just accurately, but thoughtfully.

That is why I left the high school classroom.

Not to abandon the teaching of English, but to preserve the best of it for the students who could find me.