Richard Hirstwood

The multi sensory room, or studio, has been around for 20 years in the U.K. and Ireland and is still growing in popularity. There is no question that its use with children with special educational needs is well documented and it is now an established, wonderful, imaginative tool in the educational armoury afforded to schools and centres all over the country.

In special schools and colleges, when working with children & young adults with more profound disabilities, the multi sensory studio is a very flexible space for sensory stimulation. Many children need the controlled environmental stimulation to engage in appropriate sensory stimulation activities or 'sensology'. It is also a space where the children can experience and learn the pre requisite skills to some of the more complex curriculum subjects.

Consider the numeracy skills involved in touching a bubble tube. You may sit with a child saying, "one, two, three, bubbles" and then, hand over hand, with the child touch the tube. You would then repeat this over and over again, not only reinforcing the communication and sensory stimulation, but also reinforcing lots of mathematical experimentation. The numerical language we use in the exercise "one, two, three...bubbles" strengthens sequencing skills and prediction. It also exposes the child to numerical language. Moving towards and touching the tube is reinforcing the child's understanding of space, distance, time and pressure. There lots of numeric pre requisites to be learned and the former are all essential components involved in this process.

Multi sensory rooms are being included in the guidelines for many curriculum documents - such as the Irish Curriculum from the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (NCCA) and the wonderful new 'Routes to learning' from the National Assembly for Wales. Through these publications practitioners will have a much better idea about the targets that can be achieved in special education within the multi sensory studio.

One of the biggest steps forward for the continuation of sensory approaches and multi sensory rooms/studio's in education is the inclusive setting. Many pre-5's centres have multi sensory rooms and most have very few special children, so what are they doing with sensory equipment? The answer lies in using the equipment to meet the needs of varied learners or varied learning styles. Howard Gardner, a professor of cognition and education at Harvard Graduate School of Education, identified different learning styles including musical learners, mathematical learners and linguistic learners to name but a few. These are all preferred learning styles many of us possess. As an academic at school I faired poorly, because I was one of the many kinesthetic/visual learners in my school. In other words, I could not sit still for long, and my eyes wandered to more interesting subjects outside the window of the classroom, resulting in many reprimands from my teachers! 'Multiple intelligence's' as they are known, encourages the practitioner to find out what the child is good at and to work from there.

If you work with the child’s preferred learning style, as opposed to the more common method of working from what the child is not good at, you are then teaching them from a position of strength rather than weakness.

As many practitioners are finding, it makes sense! However, what has been difficult has been to translate the theory into practice. You may have a majority of visual learners in your group, but how do you make literacy visual? Pictures, puppets and music and other more traditional tools will, of course, greatly assist. But the tools offered by the multi sensory studio have given practitioners a new exiting range of tools needed in their armoury to meet the needs of children with varied learning styles. Try using a projector to look at leaf wheels to increase interest in science or a bubble tube to captivate the imagination of children when reading stories!


A few weeks ago, I worked in an inclusion unit in a secondary school for two days where we used the studio purely for curriculum learning. A teacher commented that writing in light was a great way of teaching some of the more banal words and concepts of grammar, which for some students is as dull as dishwater! In the school sessions we used a 'Harry Potter' DVD video back projected into umbrellas to study literacy. We found that many areas of the curriculum can be excitingly demonstrated using the tools in the multi sensory studio. I encouraged the students in the school to make science wheels for the projector; we then used the projector like a giant microscope to enlarge the objects the students had put inside the wheel. We studied materials such as paper and netting, discussed the subject of transparency, opaqueness and solidity. One student made a Ferrari wheel, with a picture of the car and a Turkish flag depicting where the next grand prix was going to be held - wonderful geography! We used sound equipment to create sound environments and to encourage communication skills. It was a great two days and when the space was described to teachers and students in the school as a 'studio' not a multi sensory room, the ideas began to flow.

As it is a large school, so we also considered the eight hundred or so mainstream students in the school. How could they be involved in the studio? I had a meeting with sixth form students and demonstrated the studio. They could see that it was a very exiting concept and they offered many skills to assist in the innovation and imagination needed to use this new tool for secondary education. The mainstream students offered skills such as making projector wheels appropriate for curriculum on the computer using digital photography, and then printing them ready for use - a skill that many teachers have not mastered! There was also the technical side of the room for those students interested in sound and lighting. The humanitarian angle was discussed. It is important to know about & understand the needs of others. The multi sensory studio has a lot to offer a very wide range of students in school - at many different levels of understanding.

Multi sensory studio's will be around for sometime yet and there use is evidence that they are going to become more technical and varied in their use. The increased use of computer control and introduction of data projectors are turning these spaces, one perceived for relaxation and early stimulation, into wonderful areas for imaginative learning.

Richard Hirstwood
www.multi-sensory-room.co.uk
richardhirstwood@gmail.com