What is a Sensory Room?

A sensory room is a room in your house that is designed to provide a controlled sensory experience that is safe and designed specifically for the needs of your child. The term "sensory room" refers to a specific room, with specific sensory equipment and activities, to benefit specific sensory processing difficulties.

The room must be set-up to your child’s specific sensory needs, which ideally would be determined by a knowledgeable professional such as an occupational therapist (OT). A sensory room becomes therapeutic depending on how, when, and why the equipment or activities are used. This article will cover generalized equipment and activities that can be used in a sensory room. If your child has been diagnosed with sensory processing dysfunction, please consult with your OT to address your child’s specific needs.

Sensory processing is not cut and dry and often children don't fall on one end of the sensory spectrum or the other. This is the reason an OT can help you set up a room specific to your child's needs. Remember, the point of a sensory room is to calm or stimulate an individual through the use of each of the 7 senses. The 5 usual senses: sight, taste, touch, smell, and hearing and the other 2 senses: proprioception and vestibular should all be incorporated into the sensory room.

At this point you may be asking what are our proprioceptive and vestibular senses? The sense of proprioception allows us to know what position our body parts are in. For example, without looking at them, you can tell if your elbows or knees are bent or straight. This sense also tells us about the force of our movements. So if we see a cup and want to reach for it, we can judge how much force and speed we are reaching with so we can accurately get our hand to the cup without knocking it over or missing it. We can also tell how hard we need to hold on to lift the cup without crushing or dropping it. It is proprioception you are using when you walk a familiar flight of stairs in the dark and know exactly where to place your feet and how high the steps are by the feel of the movement of your legs. We use proprioception for body awareness and coordinated movements. The vestibular sense allows us to maintain our balance and upright posture. It is also closely involved with the visual system, allowing us to judge our motion in relation to the objects around us. This can sometimes play tricks on us (sitting in one of those movies where you feel like you are moving when you aren't). This sense allows us to feel secure with gravity and is a way of knowing where we are in relation to gravity (if we are upside-down or sideways).

How is a Sensory Room Utilized?

A sensory room consisting of various pieces of sensory equipment is used first to help facilitate self-regulation through either calming or stimulating. This is accomplished by surrounding your child with controlled sensory input. The level of your child’s arousal, either too high or too low, is matched to the degree, intensity, and frequency of sensory input. The room is carefully put together to satisfy your child’s need for sensory produced self-regulation. The stimulation is then increased or decreased to meet your child’s needs. Your child’s needs have been met when they have an adaptive response. An adaptive response is defined as the child initiating and reacting in a meaningful, productive way to situations, things, and people in their environment. The sensory room stimulates the primary senses of sight, taste, touch, smell, hearing, vestibular and proprioception. In its initial phase, the sensory room is a passive experience, but should become an interactive environment.

How to incorporate the 7 senses into your sensory room?

Visual Input And Lighting: Your sensory room should have a variety of controllable light sources. The key to lighting in your sensory room is to make sure there are NO fluorescent lights. Fiber optic lights, rope lights, strands of small white lights, light cubes and low wattage pastel colored light bulbs are all good ideas. You can also have opportunities to play with light using flashlights, light-up spinning ball wands, glow in the dark decals, and laser lights. Playing flashlight/laser tag by shining your light on the wall and your child has to shine his light in the same spot. Reading books using a flashlight or reading light can also be fun. You can incorporate most of the handheld lights inside a tent, fort or tunnel.

Taste: Exploring with the mouth can also be alerting or calming. A great way to incorporate taste into your sensory room is to provide a variety of foods with a variety of textures to lick, suck and chew. For alerting activities, include sweet, salty, spicy, and/or sour flavors. For calming activities, include chewy candy, gum, sucking activities (different liquid consistencies through a straw) and blowing activities (horns and whistles). If your child is a picky eater, continue to present a variety of food items. You can do other things with the food besides eating it including: touching, scooping, “painting”, be creative. You don’t want to force your child to eat anything he is anxious about.

Oral massagers can be useful to desensitize the mouth or to provide increased input your child may be craving. Allow your child to control the massager, but encourage him to put it on his lips, cheeks, tongue and chin.

Tactile (Touch): The Tactile System has the largest sensory organ - our skin. Since our fingers have the greatest number of touch receptors, it is a good idea to include a variety of textures to play with in your sensory room. Popular tactile input activities will include Playdoh?, slime, floam, in-side out balls, color morph balls, texture boards, books and puzzles, finger painting with paint or a variety of textures (pudding, yogurt, shaving cream, funny foam), koosh balls, texture book made of various fabric swatches (i.e., satin, carpet swatches, silk, lambs wool and washcloths) and sensory bins filled with rice, beans, sand etc. You can hide objects in the rice bin for your child to find in order to complete a puzzle or an activity.

Smell: Different scents can be calming or alerting to children with sensory processing disorders. Using a variety of aromas in your sensory room may enhance your child’s sensory experience. You can use scented oils, scent diffusers, scented markers, scented Playdoh?, scented stuffed animals or blankets, and/or scented neck wraps, potpourri, air sprays or scented wall plugs.

Great calming scents include but are not limited to vanilla, lavender, and jasmine. Some stimulating scents include but are not limited to cinnamon, strong sweet or sour smells, peppermint and floral scents.

Auditory: Soothing sounds can be incorporated into your sensory room in many ways including CD's, tapes, nature sound machines, white noise machines and indoor wind chimes. Nature sounds, white noise, classical music, smooth jazz music, and other instrumental music are the most popular choices for calming, organizing input. Children’s music, rock music, upbeat music tend to be more stimulating auditory inputs. Whether you are working with an OT or not, you may instinctively know what is calming, soothing, or stimulating for your child.

Vestibular Input: The core aspect of a sensory room is a suspended swing that moves in one plane, which can be expensive. However, a swing would definitely be the one piece of equipment you would want.

A cheaper alternative to a suspended swing is the Rainy Day Indoor Playground found at www.playawaytoy.com. You could also use hammocks, hammock chairs, glider swings, and glider rockers. These alternatives give you some of the same effects. Either way, the gentle swinging motion can be either soothing or stimulating depending on its use. Other vestibular activities include regular swings, slides, balance boards, barrels to roll in and rocking or bouncing on a therapy ball.

Proprioception: Sensory rooms need many sources of good proprioceptive input. Any
activities that allow the individual to be "squished" or "hugged" will give the deep pressure (proprioceptive) input their bodies crave. You can play “steamroller” by rolling a large therapy ball over your child’s back while they lay on their stomach. Make “burrito” rolls by rolling your child tightly in a blanket. The child can stay in the “burrito” while you put on toppings (putting pressure with your palms on your child’s arms, legs, back). Make your child into a “sandwich” using two couch cushions or bed pillows. Your child will be between the two cushions/pillows and you can add “ingredients/condiments” to the “sandwich” (putting pressure with your palms on your child’s arms, legs, back). Weighted vests and blankets, big floor pillows, beanbag chairs, Lycra swings and Lycra vests provide good proprioceptive input. Deep pressure input is typically very calming for most children.

Some other ideas to provide “heavy work” or proprioceptive input are scooter boards, moon shoes, tunnels, stacking heavy objects (gallon bottles, phone books, 2-liter bottles filled with water and super glued shut), hippity hop balls, mini trampolines, squeeze balls and things to climb or hang on.

Basically, a sensory room developed around an individual's sensory needs can be a very valuable therapeutic tool.

General Suggestions:

• Plan time for “therapy” sessions. You should utilize your sensory room 1-2 times per day, depending on the individual's needs. Ideal times of the day would be before school and after school, but before homework.
  
• Your child should be supervised in the sensory room, especially if you have a swing in the sensory room.
  
• Encourage activities that combine more than one sense for example vestibular and vision: using glow in the dark decals while swinging.
  
• Note your child’s response to certain activities and eliminate any activities that over stimulate or create an adverse reaction.

In summary, a sensory room should be an enjoyable experience for both you and your child. It should be a positive, exploratory time that promotes self-regulation for your child.

Resources:
Ayres, A.J. (1979). Sensory Integration and the Child. Los Angeles, CA: Western Psychological Services.
Greenspan, S. and Wieder, S. (1998). The Child with Special Needs. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley.
Kranowitz, Carol (1998). The Out-of-Sync Child. New York: Perigree Books.
Oetter, P., Richter, E. and Frick, S. (1993). MORE: Integrating the Mouth with Sensory and Postural Functions. Hugo, MN: PDP Press, Inc.
Wilbarger, P. (1991). Sensory Defensiveness in Children: an Intervention Guide for Parents and other Caretakers. Santa Barbara, CA: Avanti Educational Programs