The Sensory Detective Curriculum: Discovering Sensory Processing and How It Supports Attention, Focus and Regulation Skills - Softcover

Aquilla, Paula

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1935567608 ISBN 13: 9781935567608

Publisher: Future Horizons, 2016

Synopsis

Understanding our sensory processing ability helps us to understand our likes, dislikes, and regulation style, that is, the strategies we use to help keep ourselves in a calm, alert state. The calm alert state is the state necessary for learning. Knowing how to stay regulated is a life skill. This ability enables us to function in different environments, in different situations and with different people. The Sensory Detective Curriculum is a resource that can be used in a school setting to enable children to learn more about themselves and others. It meets learning goals in science and social studies and can provide a platform to discuss how we behave and communicate with each other. Opening this discussion can help us understand how tensions can rise, how bullying can happen and how children in our own classroom can feel lonely, isolated and misunderstood. The book enables students to discover sensory processing and how it supports attention, focus and regulation skills. Learning adventures include: the neurology of sensory processing; how sensory processing supports the nervous system to pay attention and focus; how emotion is connected to sensory processing and regulation. Each chapter has fun activities for students to not only deepen their understanding but to apply this understanding to their own classroom.

About this title

About the Author

Paula Aquilla lives in Toronto, Canada. She is an occupational therapist and an osteopathic manual practitioner.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Our brain can put all this information together to give us information about everything; what is happening in our bodies and what is happening in the environment. It’s absolutely marvelous! When we go outside for recess, we can feel our clothing as we move down the stairs toward the doors to the playground. We can keep our balance on the stairs and we know the position of our body, which enables us to turn around corners and make it through the doorway. Once we are outside, we scan the playground, using our vision and auditory systems and find our friends who are organizing a game of baseball. We switch from walking to running. We don’t fall because our vestibular and proprioception systems are working together to give us a constant flow of the information we need to stay upright. We may be biting into an apple and tasting that yummy goodness at the same time! We make it to our friends and begin to play.

Sensory processing happens in a part of our central nervous system called a brain stem. The brain stem is like a relay station; all the information is carried to the brain stem through individual sensory nerves. The information from all the senses gets filtered in the brain stem. Important information comes into focus and unimportant information is discarded. The brain stem works with another system called the limbic system, our emotional system, to determine what is important to pay attention to and what to ignore in that moment. For example, when we are going down the stairs, information from our vestibular, proprioceptive, tactile and visual systems come to the forefront to ensure that we don’t fall. We don’t pay as much attention to our olfactory or gustatory systems in this task. However, on pizza day, when we are eating a delicious slice of hot cheesy pizza, our brain pays more attention to our olfactory and gustatory systems so that we can enjoy the taste of the pizza.

Edition details

• Publisher: Future Horizons
• Publication date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1935567608
• ISBN 13: 9781935567608
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 277