In this instructional video, literacy specialist Lois Letchford explains the distinction between short‑term and long‑term memory and why moving information from the former to the latter is essential for struggling readers, especially those with dyslexia or other learning disabilities. She argues that traditional phonemic‑awareness drills often remain in short‑term memory and are quickly forgotten. To create durable recall, she advocates multisensory instruction—engaging sight, sound, touch, taste, humor, and experiential activities—to embed foundational words and concepts into long‑term memory. Drawing on 25 years of experience, she describes how slowing down instruction, using rich visual and tactile materials, and incorporating humor reduce stress and support social‑emotional learning. A concrete example is her “box lesson,” which combines multiple senses and memorable experiences, ensuring students retain the material. The video concludes with a call to action for educators and caregivers to adopt these strategies and subscribe for more literacy content.
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Lois Letchford here, the Literacy Problem Solver, and today I'm talking about short-term and long-term memory. And I recently read about that again, and short-term we know is small. Long-term actually has unlimited resources, an unlimited amount of information it can take. How do you know the difference? One of the simple tests for short-term memory is to give a child or give an adult A series of numbers and ask them to recall them, recite them to you. How many can they do? How many can we do? And, you know, usually it's about 7 or 8 that we can remember, and after that we just jumble them up, we forget them altogether. That's because it's in short-term memory. But you go to long-term memory and look what you can remember. You can remember all your multiplication tables and lists of things that you can remember because it's moved from short-term to long-term memory, and that's a critical component. A lot of our children seem to have this problem with short-term memory. We have to then change the way we teach so that we're not just, just teaching children to have it in there and fly out. It's got to move it from short-term to long-term memory. How do we do that? We do it by adding more senses, using more senses to learn some of these foundational words so that we're not only hearing it, that we're seeing it, and if we can taste it and we can touch it, the easier the memory is for our children and easier the recall is for our children. It is about memory, not just phonemic awareness. Because our children struggle with phonemic awareness. So how are we going to build a stronger foundation for phonemic awareness and memory and language? We have to do it all. Now, I've spent 25 years teaching some of the most vulnerable students to read— dyslexic, hyperlexic, learning disabled, you name it, they've been there. But what do we have to do? What did I do and what allowed me to teach these children to read? was how I changed this foundational teaching to use multi-sensory methods. And once we use multi-sensory methods, it's actually slowing the learning down to meet the needs of the child. It's the first thing I'm doing. And I'm giving a fuller idea, a fuller description in the word— in the way of pictures, in the way of videos. And if we can touch it, taste it, Or do anything else to have a bigger memory for these students, to use their memory and have them come back and say, ah, we did, we did that yesterday. Which leads me to the box lesson, which you can see on my videos, why that lesson is so important, because we're using sight, sound, touch, and taste and experience. And it's that experience they never forget. Humour is there as well, adding to it. And once you're into humour, we're talking about social emotional learnings. Because this is very stressful for our students. This learning, knowing you're going to be quizzed on it tomorrow and you're thinking, what have I done? What have I— what is it? What is it? I don't remember. And you're taking that away and saying, this is okay. And we can go back and find more images. We can do more. To help you move this from short-term to long-term memory. I'm Lois Letchford. Hit like, hit subscribe, and I'm talking about literacy and teaching some of the most vulnerable dyslexic learning disabled students. And don't forget to hit like and hit subscribe and join me and share my videos. Thank you.
