Our 5 senses? Think again! | Integrated Learning Therapy

Schools have it all wrong. Year after year, teachers inform learners about the five senses and we are all very familiar with the role that touch, smell, taste, sight and hearing play in our lives. Yet they omit other senses, in particular two that are crucial for living and learning. These two are ignored perhaps because they are invisible to us, but nevertheless need our attention. We could argue that these might be the most important to children’s school success.

Vestibular

The vestibular sense is housed in the inner ear and common knowledge is that it enables us to maintain balance. However, vestibular activities are responsible for much more. It is one of the building blocks of brain development and later learning. Here are some of its functions which are linked to school success (extracted from the website Griffinot.com):

Alertness and focus

The vestibular system helps with alertness and we know that learning firstly requires good attention and focus. Without good attention, it is very difficult to stay on task or to listen to your teacher. If you can’t stay focused on a task, it will take a lot longer to get the work done.

Balance and postural control

Balance and postural control (easily maintaining bodily positions) are essential for all motor skills. Sitting at a desk requires good postural control. So does sitting on the carpet. Without it, you will likely start leaning on your peers or fidgeting. Using a pencil or a computer also require good postural control. Playtime and sports are also much more difficult without good balance and postural control.

Children who are more sensitive to movement may avoid activities and reduce their opportunities for learning. Those who seek out extra input often are too quick and have poor control over their movements. They often get in trouble for constantly being on the go. Those with slower responses often have poor coordination and tire more easily as they need to use more effort to sustain positions than their peers.

Spatial awareness

Spatial awareness is knowing where your body is in relation to everything else in your environment. It’s important to ensure you don’t bump into others and can easily move around. Knowing how things are positioned in space is also important for subjects like maths and essential for times tables. It plays a role in making sure you get your letters and numbers facing the right way and on the line. Visual processing is also important for these things, but the vestibular system helps to lays the foundation.

Eye movements

Good control over eye movements is also essential for most learning tasks. When reading, you need to be able to scan from left to right, then move your eyes back to the left without skipping lines. When looking at the teacher, you have to be able to look at the teacher then the board then your work, ideally with smooth transitions between each. To catch a ball you need to be able to track it and keep focused on it to allow your hands to be ready to catch. If you’re running you also need the image to stay steady rather than bounce up and down.

Overall our vestibular sense is really essential for learning! This is why the more opportunities a child is given for vestibular activities throughout the school day or during home schooling, the more readily available they will be to receive cognitive information.

Proprioception

The proprioceptive sense is our subconscious awareness of our body. A child who has difficulty with the proprioceptive sense may be the one who is clumsy, who sleeps restlessly, who plays too roughly because she is unaware of where her body is in space or how to moderate her movements.

Not knowing where your position is in space makes it difficult to understand abstract concepts such as before and after, above and below, up and down. This impacts on mathematics, time concepts and spelling, amongst others.

While it may not be noticeable to us adults as observers, these children may be working really hard just to keep their bodies in their seats during lessons. If they are working that hard to keep their bodies in the right position, it may be really hard for them to concentrate on what is exactly being taught. We can help these children out by allowing movement breaks prior to learning experiences so they are as ready as they can be to receive and process information.

The good news is that we can help a child restore better functioning of these senses. In the next post, I’ll be listing signs that a child’s vestibular and proprioceptive senses are in need of help.

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Martin Doherty, writing for The Conversation, says that at the age of about four, children reach important milestones in brain development.

One of these is a huge improvement in understanding others’ thoughts and feelings. This is the start of empathy. Another is in spatial thinking—understanding how objects are positioned and related. This is the beginning of the ability to read maps.

Martin and his colleague, Catherine Sayer, conducted a study with 175 two to five-year-olds to explore how children are able to use scale models to figure out where something is in the real world. At about four, children are able to use a scale model of a room to work out where something is. We thought that this might result from children’s understanding of how one thing can represent something else. But we actually found that four-year-olds’ ability to use scale models came from their spatial abilities.

At the same age, children start to understand that someone’s behaviour is due to what that person believes, not necessarily what is really the case. This has interesting consequences.

If you’ve played hide-and-seek with young children, you may have noticed that they aren’t always very good at it. They love the ritual of looking in all the wrong places first, but beforehand they may tell you where they are going to hide, hide in the same place every time, or not be especially hidden.

After their fourth birthday, they get much better at hide and seek. They understand that the seeker looks in the wrong places because they don’t know where the hider is.

At about three to four children also start to tell lies. They realize they can make someone believe something that isn’t true.

Understanding symbols

Martin’s earlier research with fellow psychologist Josef Perner suggests that four-year-olds don’t just start to understand how others’ minds work. Figuring this out is part of the development of an understanding of “representation”—that symbols, like thoughts, words, or pictures, can be used to stand for something else.

Children start to think about how words relate to objects. This means, for instance, knowing that “animal” can refer to something you already have a name for, such as “rabbit”. This might help children learn the new word.

Their ability to use a understand the components of pictures also improves around this age. Very young children use a lot of trial and error to complete a jigsaw, picking up random pieces to see if they fit. By the time they are about four years old, they start to use the picture as a guide, trying to connect lines and match bits of colour, while checking the guide picture on the box lid.

Developmental experiments

Another ability children develop at around four is using scale models. A classic set of developmental experiments involved a model of a regular household room. The real room had typical furniture—sofa, table, cupboard and so on—and the model had miniature versions laid out in the same way.

Children were shown where something was hidden in the model and told to find an object hidden in “the same place” in the room. Children of around four can find the object using the identical layouts. If shown a sticker under a particular chair in the model room, for example, they can go straight to the “same” chair in the other room. This is the fundamental understanding required to read maps.

Adults see scale models and maps as representations. Maps represent a town or a country. A scale model of, say, the Eiffel Tower represents the real thing. At first, Martin suspected children’s ability to use scale models is more evidence of understanding representation at this age.

He was wrong. Instead, the researchers found that this ability is based on a development in children’s spatial abilities that also occurs at about four. This is the ability to think about spaces and where objects are within them. Spatial abilities help with maths skills, and good spatial ability is linked to an interest in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Their experiment was simple. They compared the model room task with a test of understanding how representation works. The two abilities develop around the same age, but they found they were not related. Children who could do one task couldn’t necessarily do the other.

They also had a test of purely spatial ability. Children who passed the model room task also passed the spatial task. So it looks like the model room task relied on children‘s spatial thinking.

They don’t yet know why two important but apparently unrelated abilities arise at the same time. Perhaps it’s related to changes in the growing brain at this interesting age.

Provided by The Conversation.

Image supplied by Freepik.