Playberry Multisensory Literacy Program
The Playberry Multisensory Literacy Program is a Tier 3, intensive intervention for students with severe reading and spelling
difficulties. The Playberry program, which has evolved from the Hickey Program, is recommended by The British Dyslexia Association and
the International Dyslexia Association US.
Playberry is designed to be the most powerful intervention program and has been developed to be used with students who have not made
adequate progress from quality classroom instruction and also have not responded adequately to a Tier 2 evidence-based group intervention.
The Intervention Pyramid shows the three tiers of support for students in a classroom learning environment:
Tier 1 - RED: The whole class.
Tier 2 - YELLOW: Small group interventions whereby a Student Support Officer may be assigned, or a teacher would spend
a little extra time with the group, whilst the rest of the class continue with the lesson task.
Tier 3 - GREEN: Intensive interventions whereby a student works one-on-one with a Student Support Officer either within
the classroom, or separately at a quieter location.
The Intervention Pyramid
Learning difficulties like dyslexia impact the way that brain processes speech sounds. These students need more instructional depth and
the need for more practice.
Teaching literacy using the multisensory Playberry Program will show word retrieval becoming easier. Playberry has a specific focus as to
the way the brain stores the word information.
Often there can be two words that sound very similar, but can be used incorrectly when a student does not listen to the actual sounds the word
makes and then looking at the letters that make up that word.
For example: 'sad' and 'said'.
These words differ by the middle, vowel sound only: the short "a" sound in the word sad versus the short "e" sound that you hear with the letters ai
in the word said.
Whereas, with 'house' and 'horse', the words are almost identical. The "o" sound is pronounced like the
word "owl" without the "l" in the word house. The "o" sound is pronounced "or" in the word horse. Tier 3 students may see the two words
as the same word, and not realise the word is actually different when the letter "u" changes to letter "r" making the words "house" and "horse":
sad versus said
house versus horse
Without the Tier 3 Multi-Sensory Literacy tutoring - for students with learning difficulties, their decoding, reading, writing and spelling
will continue to be slow, they guess at words, and their writing will continue to have noticeable errors. Students become anxious, lack
confidence, and although they keep trying, they feel like they are just not good enough.
Specialised Multi-Sensory Literacy tutoring is different to English literature tutoring.
At Red OWL Dyslexia we record a student's progress to use when preparing an individualised lesson plan. It is time well spent because
we want to help students read, write, and spell to the best of their abilities.
Please feel free to read more about the 'Orton-Gillingham Approach' and
the 'Dyscalculia Support Program' we use for tutoring.
Alternatively, 'contact Vikki @ Red OWL Dyslexia' directly to arrange
an appointment for tutoring and to learn more.
