Wired Differently

A Teacher's Guide to Understanding Sensory Processing Challenges

Keriann Wilmot

• Publisher: Gryphon House Inc.
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780876597996
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación infantil

Preschool is a time of wonder when curiosity, development, and learning intersect. While the new sights, routines, and experiences can make preschool exhilarating, what about children who struggle? Perhaps they exhibit odd behaviors: chewing on clothing, covering their ears, avoiding certain textures, refusing to sit with peers, screaming when frustrated, hitting, kicking, or biting. Wired Differently will help you to decode what may seem like everyday challenging behaviors. It's possible that these children are struggling with sensory processing disorder (SPD). • Differentiate between everyday challenging behaviors, and those that could signify something much more
• Understand what sensory processing disorder (SPD) is and how it can interfere with a child's learning
• Learn how to include sensory processing strategies as part of a typical classroom routine, and why they're important for all children
• Effectively communicate with families about SPD behaviors and helpful learning techniques

Chapter 1
Sensory Processing Disorder

The Senses

Most people know about the traditional five senses: sight, smell, touch, hearing, and taste. While it might not be something that you think about consciously, every day our brain uses these senses to process information from the world around us. Multisensory learning is the basis for how children are educated in an early childhood classroom. Children’s senses are engaged throughout the day as they learn and explore.

Children use their sense of sight to observe the teacher demonstrating new skills for matching colors, forming letters, or imitating actions of a new song. Some might become aware of the smell of disinfectant wipes used to clean the classroom, while others don’t notice the scent of air fresheners or diffusers. Paints, sand, and other sensory textures are available to explore with their sense of touch. Noises surround them in the form of music played during movement breaks and transitions, loud banging from children building and toppling structures in the block corner, the flush of the toilet in the restroom, and the chatter of children working at different centers with their peers. While certainly taste is mostly reserved for snacks and mealtimes, I’m sure you’ve encountered a child who just can’t help sampling the paint or playdough, while others nibble or mouth blocks, toys, and other manipulatives.

In addition to these five, three more senses are important to understand: proprioception, vestibular sense, and interoception.

• Proprioception: a sense of body awareness; knowing how to control and coordinate our muscles and joints during everyday activities using the right force and speed
• Vestibular sense: our sense of balance, located in our inner ear
• Interoception: a newly identified sense that helps body parts communicate to the brain that a person might be hungry, tired, or have to use the restroom

Now let’s add these three additional senses and see how they affect a child in the classroom. In terms of proprioception, children need to develop an appropriate sense of body awareness as they move about the classroom, so they can maintain boundaries and avoid invading another’s personal space. It’s important to regulate the force of their muscles for activities, so they can squeeze the appropriate amount of glue onto a piece of paper or regulate their force so the play structure they’ve worked hard to build doesn’t get knocked over.

Then, with their sense of vestibular sense and use of movement, children travel from one center to another with the appropriate speed, and they transition from sitting to standing at circle time during music and movement. Interoception is a sense we are learning more about. The body’s organs contain receptors that are crucial for skills such as digestion, hunger, pain, and knowing when to use the restroom in time without having an accident. It can be difficult for children to perform if their systems are not working efficiently or if there is an issue with the neurological system integrating and coordinating all of this sensory input over the course of the day.

When these systems are not working in harmony, many children will overreact or underreact to the information their brains are receiving, which can cause any number of issues in the classroom. Think about what happens when you are driving a car and hear a fire engine’s siren. You have learned in that situation not to panic but to slow the vehicle and pull over. But if the siren triggers a fight-or-flight reaction, you may panic and speed up unsafely, because your sensory system is overwhelmed.

All children need to develop safe, appropriate responses to stimuli, but children who struggle with SPD have a hard time reacting appropriately to everyday sensory stimuli. Instead, they respond with atypical, inappropriate, or unexpected reactions. Children with SPD often need help to work through these obstacles, because their reactions tend to be much more intense and challenging than those of their peers. They need help and support to develop self-regulation.

Self-regulation is awareness of one’s own emotions and activity level, figuring out behavioral strategies needed to be successful, and advocating for those strategies. Under the guidance or supervision of a teacher or parent, children can learn how to self-regulate. Children with SPD often have unique classroom behaviors that are seen as inappropriate. However, if you watch carefully and ask questions, you’ll soon realize that maybe the child who is sitting with his feet up on a desk or is rocking back in his chair is attempting to self-regulate so he can pay attention to classroom instructions. Closely observe what children are doing in the classroom and what they are asking for. Set limits, boundaries, and classroom expectations, but also be responsive to children’s needs. If a child is asking to take a break to get his wiggles out, and it’s an appropriate request to get work done rather than to avoid it, honor that request. That child has identified a strategy that might be crucial to his classroom success.

Sensory Processing Disorder Defined

Sensory processing disorder (SPD) was originally known as sensory integration dysfunction. Children who have these unique challenges are also referred to as having sensory issues or sensory processing issues. For those who might be hearing these terms and names for the first time, SPD is a very broad neurophysiological condition. The main term does not really give any hints as to what the issues might be or how severe they are, since not every child with SPD reacts and responds in the same way.

The late A. Jean Ayres, PhD, OTR, was an occupational therapist, educational psychologist, and researcher who first identified these challenges and this disorder in the late 1970s. Her book Sensory Integration and the Child has served as a reference and a handbook for those learning about the disorder. In her book, Dr. Ayres uses an excellent analogy to help readers understand SPD. She suggests they envision having a traffic cop in the brain. When information from the environment enters the brain through one or more of our senses, the traffic cop has a very important job: to determine what to do with that information before making an appropriate response.

Other pioneers in sensory-integration research include Lucy Jane Miller, PhD, OTR/L, and Carol Kranowitz. Dr. Miller is the founder of the STAR Institute for Sensory Processing Disorder, an organization created to offer research, education, and treatment for individuals with SPD. Ms. Kranowitz was a music, movement, and drama teacher who worked with preschoolers. Her popular book The Out-of-Sync Child is an excellent resource for parents seeking to learn about sensory processing disorder and to find strategies to assist with sensory integration.

SPD is an individual’s inability to control or coordinate all the sensory input from the world that is entering their system through their senses. This results in feelings of being overwhelmed and overstimulated, which are exhibited as many different types of “unwanted behaviors.” Children who struggle with SPD have a hard time succeeding and coping when completing everyday life activities and routines, especially when they are required to participate in and focus on academic tasks as part of a large-group environment in school. Note that sensory processing issues do not discriminate based upon age. Because school is often the first time children are asked to participate and perform in new, challenging environments outside of their homes, sensory issues are often identified in school-aged children; however, infants and adults can struggle with SPD as well.

It has been reported by the STAR Institute that one in twenty people in the general population may be affected by SPD. A 2013 study by Julia Owen and colleagues at Benioff Children’s Hospital at the University of California, San Francisco, was the first to identify structural differences in the white matter of the brain with children who have sensory processing issues. It is not known what causes SPD, but of those with diagnoses such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and autism, the incidence of SPD may even be higher than one in twenty. Genetics could also play a factor in diagnosis. What we know for sure is that we need continued research to truly understand this complicated disorder.

Everyone has sensory preferences that are part of who they are, and every human being can face sensory challenges. For example, you might not like the scratchiness of tags and seams in your clothes, so you buy soft clothes without seams and cut the tags out. Another person may absolutely refuse to mix their corn into their mashed potatoes at Thanksgiving dinner, keeping each food perfectly separated on the plate. But when a child has so many preferences that it impacts his daily functioning, we can identify that there may be sensory processing disorder.

Sensory processing disorder is complicated. It is a self-regulation disorder that is affected by a child’s arousal level. Thus, an overstimulating event or situation that occurred hours or even days before may affect a child’s energy level and participation at a later time. And a child’s inconsistencies in behavior can make SPD very difficult to identify and extremely frustrating for caregivers who want to help. Why does a noise, a texture, or lighting lead to a major meltdown today but not tomorrow? Identifying SPD can be even more complicated because some children perform better in certain environments and struggle in others. While many children thrive on the structure and consistency of school programs and teachers, others function better at home where there is less stimulation, far away from the sights, sounds, and experiences that continually bombard their systems in a classroom. A child’s inconsistent responses can also lead to a lot of animosity...

Table of contents

• Copyright
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Sensory Processing Disorder
• Chapter 2 Sensory Processing Disorder in the Early Childhood Classroom
• Chapter 3 Setting Up a Sensory-Friendly Classroom
• Chapter 4 Practical Tools to Meet the Needs of All Children in the Classroom
• Chatper 5 Technology Tools to Help Children with SPD
• Chapter 6 Accommodations for Specific Sensory Processing Issues
• Closing Thoughts
• Appendix: Websites and Resources
• References