Sensory Corridors component stickers and themes are designed to engage all the senses including the less well-known but essential proprioceptive sense and vestibular sense. These sensory stickers incorporate heavy work activities which provide deep intensive stimulation to the muscles and joints (proprioception) and incorporate spinning, jumping, hopping and tipping of the head (vestibular input). These activities lead to an increased alertness, increased attention and increased calmness.
Designed by an Occupational Therapist with training and experience in both Neurodevelopmental Therapy and Sensory Integration Therapy, they address areas of balance, core muscle strength and co-ordination. An integration of information from all the sensory systems is present. The sensory systems involved included the proprioceptive sense, vestibular sense, tactile sense and visual sense.
This sense allows a child to know his body’s position in space and to regulate the speed, direction and force of their movement. This sense is detected by sensory receptors in the joints and muscles. The proprioceptive system is stimulated when a child pushes, pulls, lifts, jumps or hangs. Often referred to as ‘heavy work’ activities, movement that stimulates the proprioceptive system has both a calming and alerting effect on the body so is an extremely useful tool to regulate attention and for the management of children with attention deficits.
This sense tells a child when she is moving, where her head is in space and plays an essential role in balance, co-ordination and posture. Small hair-like receptors in our inner ear detect changes in speed and direction of movement sending valuable information to our muscles to adjust our movement. This gives us gravitational security, the feeling that we can move or hold a position without falling over. The vestibular sense is stimulated by jumping, hopping, shifting our weight and changing the position of our heads in space e.g. tipping upside down. Anytime we move the body or the head we activate the vestibular sense. This activation sends signals to eyes telling them that they need to respond. The vestibular system and the visual system are intricately related and dependent on each other.
This sense allows a child to feel when he is being touched and the quality of the touch stimulus e.g. sharp/dull, light/hard. It also helps us to find an object in a bag or the dark when we don’t have our vision to rely on. We can sense the form and shape and associate these perceptions with previous memory for objects. Children need intact tactile sensory processing to develop body awareness, skilled use of hands and motor planning skills. The tactile sense most often teams with the proprioceptive sense to give us rich sensory picture of our bodies and their interaction with the environment.
This sense collects information from the eyes which then allow the brain to interpret and make sense of the world we see around us and the objects we interact with. The visual system works closely with the other senses, particularly the vestibular sense, to keep us upright and balanced, to enable us to navigate and locate objects in our environment.