Lecture 7 min.
Sensory integration in English lessons is a powerful tool that helps activate students' different channels of perception and make learning more effective and engaging. Here is how it can work in practice:
Sensory integration is an approach that involves sight, hearing, touch, movement and even smell in perceiving and assimilating information. It is especially useful for younger schoolchildren and for children with perceptual differences.
Visual stimuli: cards with pictures and words, colour associations, video clips.
Auditory exercises: songs, rhymes, listening to dialogues followed by repetition.
Tactile tasks: working with letters made of felt, sand or plasticine to memorize the alphabet.
Kinesthetic games: moving around the classroom in search of words, role-plays, "living" grammatical structures.
Olfactory and gustatory associations: using smells (for example, vanilla when studying the topic "food") to create lasting associative links.
Increased motivation and engagement
Improved memorization through multichannel perception
Development of interhemispheric interaction
Support for children with different learning styles
Reducing or, conversely, stimulating the child's sensitivity and helping the child process information correctly. Everything we know about ourselves and about this world is told to us by our sense organs. We receive information through our sensory systems: visual, auditory, tactile, gustatory, olfactory, vestibular and proprioceptive.
The nervous system is like an electrical circuit: for it to work fully, all the sensors and conductors must work with equal efficiency. If some wire cannot withstand the required voltage or, conversely, has increased resistance, the circuit operates in a suboptimal mode and may "short out". The same happens with the nervous system of our body. Every second a huge number of sensory impulses are transmitted from external and internal organs to the brain even before the baby is born, and after birth their number increases many times over. If a child is born healthy and grows up in a rich sensory environment (is often picked up, talked to, offered objects of different textures to touch and put in the mouth, and helped to move), then, as a rule, there are no problems in the development of motor skills, speech and behaviour. A child must have the chance to move a great deal on his or her own, actively entering into all sorts of interactions with the world: to dig in the sandbox from morning till night, climb trees, play "cossacks and robbers", elastic-band jumping and other active games with peers, splash barefoot through mud and puddles, and collect bumps and scrapes... All of this was part of our childhood and the childhood of our parents and grandparents. And it is exactly what modern children catastrophically lack. This is precisely the source of the snowballing growth in attention and learning problems among schoolchildren: motor clumsiness, rapid exhaustion of the nervous system, emotional instability...
Sensory integration is the name of a method whose essence is to help our children make up for a deficit of sensory experience, the very experience that the environment of modern society does not give them. Children misinterpret tactile, visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory and motor information, which leads to problems with behaviour, learning, speech development, communication, muscle tone and coordination.
Sensory integration (SI) is the organization of sensory signals through which the brain ensures effective bodily responses and forms emotions and behaviour. The purpose of this process is to plan and carry out appropriate actions in response to a sensory stimulus, external or internal.
The term "sensory integration" was first proposed by the well-known American psychologist and occupational therapist Jean Ayres in 1963 to describe how disorders of sensory processing can manifest themselves in various behavioural problems. She believed that:
"Before we can learn to read and count, we must make sense of what we see and hear, and be able to plan our movements and organize our behaviour. This ability depends on how efficiently our nervous system organizes the information it receives from the sense organs";
Until about the age of 7, a child's brain works mainly as a device for processing sensory information. This means that the child perceives the surrounding world and objects and draws conclusions about them based directly on sensations. Young children do not have developed abstract thinking and do not operate with abstract concepts. They are mainly occupied with perceiving things and moving the body in accordance with their sensations. Their adaptive responses are more often muscular, or motor, in nature, which is why the first seven years of life are called the period of sensorimotor development.
Sensory integration in English lessons makes the assimilation of material more productive. Previously, sensory integration was used only in special education (defectology), but the statistics on children with developmental disorders grow every year, which prompts us to consider the preventive use of this practice. Modern children spend their time on gadgets, which causes a number of developmental delays. Spending a lot of time on phones, game consoles and computers, a child stops thinking and the imagination does not develop. Modern children take in interactive information better than in live communication, which has a harmful effect on analytical thinking. By using sensory integration during a lesson, the teacher can not only make the lesson colourful, interesting and varied but also contribute to the further development of the child's intellectual and psychological health.
For example, a sensory bag can be used as a warm-up in a lesson. This technique helps activate certain hemispheres of the brain responsible for logic, and also calms the child in cases of hyperactivity.
The "Scarf" technique also works well. A child absorbs both positive and negative emotions from society. Modern children are very emotionally constrained. In 70% of modern families both parents work, so the child does not get enough attention. There are also many different external factors that can affect a child's mood, which in turn makes the learning process more difficult. When a child feels uncomfortable, you can place a soft material (a scarf) on his or her shoulders; this gives a feeling of cosiness and confidence and helps the child concentrate on the topic of the lesson.
Plasticine can be used not only in art and craft lessons. Modelling can be used to present new words on a topic, retell a story and much more, limited only by imagination. Plasticine or modelling dough is also a very good stimulator of the brain and of fine motor skills, which contributes to the development of handwriting skills. The same effect can be obtained with finger paints.
Various kinds of anti-stress toys can also be used during a lesson as a reward for good work. Small toys, puzzles and sorters on a particular theme will also help in learning a new topic or in revision.
One unconventional method is a tent or tunnel. Some children absorb information better when alone. Simulating a separate space activates visual memory. By placing the necessary information in this space, the teacher can not only present the necessary material but also help the child feel safe.
Thus, sensory integration can be an excellent tool for any teacher. This technique can be used at absolutely any age. With a little patience and imagination, the learning process will sparkle with new colours.
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