Sensory rooms provide various benefits to students, including assisting students with sensory issues from having negative reactions. Multi-sensory rooms are best suited for schools as they can accommodate all children with special needs, not just a particular group. A sensory room in schools can be an entire room or a corner of a room depending on your space and cost restraints.
Benefits of Sensory Rooms in a Special Education Setting
Sensory rooms benefit each student differently. They are calming and exciting places for students that are unable to control their senses.
Regulation
Students can learn to regulate their emotions and control their bodies. Eliminating the need to send students out-of-district for special/therapeutic services, such as occupational therapy and physical therapy, help keep the students’ day consistent.
Focus
Sensory rooms can help students with focus. Students with ADHD, autism, and other disorders often struggle to fully pay attention to what is happening around them. Sensory rooms can help increase awareness of surroundings and cope with situations where concentration is needed. This can have a direct impact on student achievement.
A Calming Place
Sensory rooms can also be calming. A dimly lit room can be calming for students, and often sensory rooms will have aromatherapy diffusers and white noise machines also intended to provide that calming aura to students. Using calming paint colors is important in the setup of the sensory room, so colors like white or light blue are great options versus bright yellow or orange.
Cognitive and Sensory Development
Other benefits of a sensory room include cognitive, sensory, and sensory-motor development. In the cognitive development realm, it is important to understand that a sensory room will not train your students how to react to situations but rather help them cope in situations that bring out their worst reactions. This is beneficial to the teacher as well, as you can learn what situations to attempt to stay away from in class.
Sensory-Motor Development Practice
Sensory-motor development can be practiced in a safe space in these rooms. As students may struggle with aligning muscle movement with their brain commands, the sensory room may provide them with swings, skip ropes, crash mats, bean bag chairs, convertible couches, etc., to support their development. Sensory development is important as exploring one’s senses and reactions to those senses is an important life skill that can be developed in a sensory room.
Socialization
Another benefit is that of socialization. Sensory rooms can be used independently, but they can also be a safe space for students to interact with one another in a safe space. Children can explore and learn together while becoming more aware of controlling their movements and reactions around others.
Can All Students Benefit from Sensory Rooms?
The simple answer is yes. All students benefit from the sensory room because the students utilizing the room are developing life and coping skills that will help them in the general education setting. Depending on how elaborate the sensory room in your school is, it can also benefit students with visual, language, or learning impairments and all younger students in kindergarten and pre-kindergarten.
Tips for Implementing Sensory Rooms
The first and most important tip in setting up a sensory room is that it is not a one-size-fits-all approach. As the room is designed to help students cope with external stimuli, and students with sensory disorders have different needs, a multi-sensory room will accommodate the needs of many students.
Find a Quiet Area
Selecting the appropriate area is important to setting up a successful sensory room. In the school, you want to attempt to find an area with little traffic that is on the quieter side. After the space for the sensory room is picked out, you want to label the different areas within the room, such as the thinking zone and time-out area. As mentioned previously, appropriate paint colors and lighting are also important for implementing the sensory room.
Calming Decorations
As far as decorations go, calming posters, paintings, or even quotes are great sensory room ideas for the walls of the sensory room. Any decor with a soothing effect will positively impact the space. Carpet squares, small area rugs, and yoga mats are all great ideas for various flooring within the space.
Different Equipment for Different Needs
Equipment for the room is the next critical piece of a sensory room. There are so many different types of equipment that can benefit students’ various needs. Some everyday items include bean bag chairs, body sacks, weighted blankets, tents, and therapy balls of varying sizes and textures, are great items to include. Different types of needs require different types of equipment. For your auditory needs, sound toys and compact activity centers are options of what to include. For tactile needs, gel mats, manipulatives, and textured balls are excellent, and for your sensory motor skills, donut balls, hanging chairs, and ball chairs will do the trick.
Sensory Room Training
Informing and training colleagues is important in the implementation of the sensory room. Having various teachers, paraprofessionals, and other support stay informed on how to best help students in the sensory room is imperative to the overall success. One person alone cannot accommodate the students’ varying needs utilizing this space.
Sensory rooms have an overall positive impact on students with special needs at all levels of development. As Joseph Curiale stated, “Life has become a state of sensory overload.” Sensory rooms can help control this and provide students with an appropriate environment to learn coping and life skills. Putting the proper support in place for our special needs students we can help them to streamline into the general education classrooms and the world.
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