The National Institutes of Health describe sensory integration as "the involuntary process by which the brain assembles a picture of our environment at each moment in time using information from all of our senses." Jean Ayres, and others who have continued her seminal work, have highlighted the problems that can occur either singularly or in combination when sensory development is not normal.  

sensory seeking - craving touch, pressure, motion, lights, sounds, and other sensory input  

sensory avoiding - avoidance of touch, pressure, motion, lights, sounds, and other sensory input  

dyspraxia and apraxia of speech - problems with motor planning and grading body movements resulting in clumsiness and/or delayed and inconsistent language development  

attentional challenges - orienting, engaging, and maintaining focus and attention  

auditory processing deficit - problems discriminating the start and end of discrete speech and ambient sounds.  

visual processing problems - resulting in difficulty making sense of visual stimuli, or transfer between visual fields such as a chalkboard and a piece of paper on a student’s desk.  

For most children sensory processing is automatic, managed by parts of the brain that operate below the conscious level. For children with sensory delays or insult to the sensory systems sensory integration is labored, occurring only with conscious effort or not at all. The result can be devastating to social and educational outcomes resulting in problems:

developing a sense of self, the environment, and others

revving up or down to sit still or activate for learning activities

transitioning between activities

planning and sequencing the steps in various activities

selectively orienting, listening, and seeing

maintaining attention and focus

recalling and being able to operate on input

engaging in creative or imaginative activity

putting oneself in the perspective of another

Much work has been accomplished in the field of treating sensory processing dysfunction in the clinic. Unfortunately few classrooms are appropriate to children with sensory challenges. Bringing together the work of Jean Ayres (and others) with the work of Maria Montessori, perhaps the first educator to discuss sensory deprivation and education of the senses, we describe here what an appropriate sensory education should look, feel, smell, and taste like; what goals it might include, and how sensory-savvy teachers might support the work of sensory integrative therapists. An appropriate sensory education will facilitate development of sensory integration and support or follow up the work of occupation, vision, and other integrative therapies. The goals of a sensory education are straightforward and intended to further strengthen missing or weak processes through ongoing training of the various sensory systems as they pertain to the educational process, and within the educational environment. While special education has historically facilitated children, an appropriate sensory education, by contrast, supports and encourages natural development of the sensory systems as they pertain to learning.  

Movement

A sensory education should address movement from both the perspective of freedom of movement and of directed movement.  

Freedom of Movement - It is developmentally inappropriate to the natural development of the vestibular and ocular-motor systems for young children under seven to sit with heads erect, doing central vision work for extended periods. Children with sensory delays need even more time before seated center vision work becomes the predominant learning format. Mats, beanbags, knee cushions, tunnels, and swings are all perfectly acceptable landscapes for learning when teachers are willing and understand the value in getting young minds at inverted angles from time to time. Floortime is an excellent format for providing close up one-on-one teacher-student time while encouraging movement and stretching out. ocular-motor development as well as peripheral or ambient vision can be supported simply and easily by letting children stand and move to a vertical writing surface rather than fixing the gaze at a teacher directed lesson.  

Directed Movement - Developmental Yoga, Brain Gym, Astronaut Training, or a similar educational kinesiology program, directed by teachers trained in these programs provides classroom relevant work with posture, stability, balance, breath, laterality, spatial awareness, motor planning, and ocular-motor, and developmental movement patterns, requisite to successful learning. Until movement is automatic and easy the child’s ‘learning-energy’ will be redirected to compensate for these missing pieces. Making the transition from a sensory-integration room to the classroom is easily facilitated when this educational piece is in place. Many students who need improvement in these functions can also benefit from listening therapy, which is easily facilitated in a classroom setting under the direction of a certified therapeutic listening program provider.  

Opportunities for Ambient and Focused Attention

A good sensory education will include multiple daily opportunities for children to flow between ambient and focused attention, gaining experience at monitoring the sights and sounds of a safe and productive classroom using alternating, and divided attention and tuning-in with focused, sustained, and selective attention when details are presented. Cognitive support can be provided with programs like Pay Attention or other cognitive teacher-delivered programs, which give children a conscious experience of the flow between these attentional processes.  

Opportunities for Multiple Engagement with Teachers and Peers

Many children with sensory challenges have trouble engaging with teachers and peers. A small, controlled, and cooperative social structure with a mix of one-on-one instruction, as well as small group and teacher directed lessons is tremendously powerful for encouraging students to engage with teachers and peers. Children who feel threatened or overwhelmed in larger large classes have an opportunity to learn to map space using the visual and auditory systems appropriately when the learning space is just a little smaller and the number of other children is more manageable. Children should be given ample opportunities to practice new skills alone and in teams, both in a formal and and game-like format.  

Imaginative Affect Based Play

DIR®/Floortime, developed by Stanley Greenspan, is an affect based intervention that follows the child’s natural emotions and interests to engage the child for learning interactions that enable the different parts of the mind and brain to work together and to build successively higher levels of social, emotional, and intellectual capacities.  

Integrated Curriculum

In approaching any instructional content concepts, skills, and information should be carefully analyzed prior to lesson development so that the student is given everything he needs to see the big picture, fill that picture with information, and build the skills needed to use the information. Skills and information should be bolstered by contextual relevance whenever possible. When integrated in this way, the curriculum offers a perfect landscape for development of conceptual thought, practice in related skills, logical construction of informatikon, and deduction of relevance.

The combination of these elements gives sensory delayed children a structure upon which to hang incoming stimuli and benefit from interrelated information presented at a big-picture or global level, followed by discrete detail, and skill practice. In a very real sense this is the mental application of ambient and focal switching mentioned earlier in this article; and it gives us a stage upon which to set development of imagination. Tying together lessons in literacy, math, and science, under the umbrella of cultural exploration, for instance, gives children with sensory challenges several ways to access information and allows them to build a network of relevance around details. With all of the above in mind, we offer functional examples below.  

The following activities give children both a big picture of how numbers work and applied practice, within the context of cultural relevance using Australian music, stories, art, and food to draw attention and ignite imagination.

Three dimensional hands-on and direct instruction in the hierarchy of numbers using the Montessori Golden bead or similar manipulatives for a view of the big picture

—counting seashells for skill practice

—make an Australian pupunya drawing with the seashells for deduction of relevance

Keeping to this theme children can build hand strength and fine motor control in this set of activities.

—working with clay for skill practice

—use clay to make a relief map of the continent of Australia for more information focusing in on the big picture

Keeping to this theme children can build hand strength and fine motor control in this set of activities.

—reward hard work described above with a taste of a native Australian food such as carambola star fruit for skill practice tasting novel foods

—open a star fruit (model curiosity, igniting imagination, skill practice with slimy food)

—use a triangular stencil at apposing angles to provide new information about how a whole can be formed from a part for spatial mapping and imagination

Giving children a big picture, a small detail, and skill practice in every situation not only builds links in the relevance and application of information, but also in connects their day and week under a common theme offering powerful experiences with the concepts of time and space.