Sensory Development and Learning
The Most Important Senses
If I were to ask you which two senses are the most important for learning in school (or beyond) you would say vision and hearing. Although many of us are kinesthetic learners, teachers use lectures, books, and worksheets more than projects, as they are the most efficient for teaching most of the students. As their job is to teach as much as they can to as many people as they can, they will use the most efficient methods. As they should.
The IEP
When a child is in special education, they receive an IEP (Individualized Education Plan or Program) requiring the teachers to help the student learn in a way that is more tailored to their needs, through the addition of any needed services and/or accommodations. It is the hope that with this IEP, the student will be able to be more successful and learn the required information for the grade, allowing the student to move on to the next grade secure with being successful.
The IEP should include accommodations so that the student can learn all of the information required to pass that grade, using the methods that work best for the student. For example, if a student has an a diagnosed auditory processing disorder, the teacher needs to provide for more visual aids for teaching this student.
I once worked with an 11 year old who had a deficiency in her receptive and expressive language. Added to that, she also had a deficit in her problem solving skills. Put this together, and in plain English it means that she could not understand instructions, whether they were given in writing or out loud. Her best way to learn was by doing - the kinesthetic learning. However, this is very time consuming, and she was about to go into Middle School, where she will not have the convenience of time. She would be left behind.
In the next few weeks, I will go into her story more in depth as we explore Auditory Processing. By the way, her story has a great ending so be sure to read all about it!
The auditory sense is just one of the senses we need, however, to be successful in school and life. We will explore the visual sense once we are done with auditory, but for now let's review some of the other senses.
Sensory Integration Disorder
A person who has a sensory integration disorder may be hypersensitive (overly sensitive) to some senses, and hyposensitive (under-sensitive) to others. Hypersensitive to hearing means that they hear better than others - can hear people talking in the next room and loud noises hurt - whereas hyposensitive to sound means that they can hear, but may not process the differences between sound that are similar - short vowel, m/n, elephant/telephone.
Hypersensitive to vision may mean that they have ADD in a visually stimulating room, like a first grade classroom, causing them to be unable to focus on their work. Hyposensitive could be the reason they complete the math problems around the edges of the worksheet yet miss some of the middle ones.
Hypersensitive to taste is the picky eater, yet hypo is the one who will eat anything, and really prefers lots of salt or spice.
Hypersensitive to smell is the one who smells everything (craving it) like lotions, perfumes, shampoo, markers. The hyposensitive person puts on too much deodorant or perfume, thinking that is smells just right.
People who are hypersensitive to touch dislike scratchy tight clothing, seams in the socks, or tags in the shirt. Those who are hyposensitive wind their hair around their fingers, rub or scratch themselves, and love to be touched.
There are two other lesser-known senses. The sense of balance is called the vestibular sense, and it develops throughout the first year of life as the baby is progressing through the primitive reflexes. If we do not have a good sense of balance, we need to constantly find our center of gravity, and may fall out of our chair without meaning to. We love swinging and going fast in order to find our balance.
The proprioceptive sense is the ability to understand our body in the world through the information we receive through our muscles and joints. If we have a poor proprioceptive sense, we need to get that information, so we feel better by wearing tight clothes and shoes, jumping up and down in our seat, and cracking our knuckles and neck.
If many of our senses are off, we feel "off", so we do things that help us feel better. When we feel off, we cannot pay attention in class or in life, until we get our sensory needs taken care of.
Where do sensory integration issues come from?
They never developed. People who have this didn't become like this at age 9. They never had the ability to sense the world in a moderate fashion.
How can we develop sensory integration?
By going back to the first year of life and developing our senses as they should have been in the first place. We do this by replicating the stages of development from that year. We integrate our primitive reflexes. It only takes minutes a day doing simple exercises.
You can learn much more about this from the Primitive Reflexes: Foundation for Learning DVD. On it is a webinar that spans over 7 hours, giving background, research, testing, integrating, and additional exercises. The videos are added in by video producer, so that they are of high quality. It is on sale for 20% off until March 31, and more information can be found at http://www.pyramidofpotential.com/primitive-reflexes/.
Next week I will go more deeply into auditory process and the primitive reflexes. Have a great week!!
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