I just attended a weekend of lecture regarding the twelve senses.  As a therapist, this was highly interesting and entertaining to me!  Many people assume there are only five major senses; in physical therapy we tend to work with eight senses; in Waldorf Education we work with twelve senses although there is now a catalog of hundreds of senses.  Our lecturer described the senses much like a tree, with senses coming off of trunks into branches, twigs, twiglets, etc.

The twelve senses can be broken down into three groups of four:  the lower sense of touch, life, movement and balance are often what we should as parents and educators be working on in the Early Years, because they have such strong correlation to the sense we are working so hard to develop in the high school years (the sense of hearing, the sense of word, the sense of thought, the sense of Thou).  In the middle are the middle senses that help us take in our world and mediate between the lower senses that concern our own body and those higher senses that include how we relate to others.  Those higher senses include how we hear and listen to others, how we perceive speech, how we understand the thoughts of others, how we know “Thou” – the others in our life and where we end and they begin.   If all this is new to you, have a peek at this past post:   http://theparentingpassageway.com/2009/06/22/the-twelve-senses/

All the senses work together; most functional tasks in life use more than one.  To me, though, touch is a bedrock of so many of these senses and one that so many children have challenges with.  If touch is defined primarily not by the surrounding circumstances that involve other systems (is it hot?  is it cold? etc), but by the experience of “this is where I end, and this is where something else begins”, we can see this connection to the very highest sense of the twelve:  the sense of Thou.  Where do you end?  Where do I begin?  What are the boundaries between us?

This is one of the first senses just assaulted in American society. Continue reading →

Some children are under-responsive to sensory stimuli.  They essentially can end up functioning in one of two ways:  either being a “sensory seeker” (you know, those children who are rather bouncing off the walls) or being sort of “bumps on the log”, (essentially because it takes such a high input of sensory input to get them to a normal state that they give up!) but share at their core challenges in processing sensory stimuli.

These children typically crave touch, sometimes repeatedly touching objects.  They can be unaware of Continue reading →

All of us lie along the sensory spectrum in terms of our reactions, to sensory stimuli, but for some adults and children, being “over” responsive or “under” responsive predominates how they react to things, to the point where it interferes with their activities of life.  So today I wanted to jump in and talk about children who are “over-responders” to sensory stimuli.  These are the children you hear about who are “sensory defensive” and many times are “avoiders” as they show behaviors that are attempts to calm their nervous systems.  Continue reading →

Yay!  I finally have gotten a chance to sit down with the notes I took at a sensory modulation course I recently attended.  It was a lot of fun to have my thinking cap on for awhile, and I have some interesting things I want to share with you all.

A sensory diet just refers to the optimum sensory input a person needs to perform at his or her peak.  So, as you can imagine, this is of vast importance to educators at school and home alike (or it should be!)

A person who is good at modulating sensory input can take what is going on, filter out what is not important and focus on the things that are relevant.

Sometimes this can be a challenge for children (and adults alike). If your child’s behavior is reflecting something in the environment and they are spending all their energy on figuring out and reacting to  the environment, then there may not be a lot of attention left over for schoolwork! Continue reading →