The Sensory Detective Curriculum
Discovering Sensory Processing and How It Supports Attention, Focus and Regulation Skills
- Publisher
- Sensory Focus
- Initial publish date
- Aug 2016
- Category
- General, Autism Spectrum Disorders
-
Paperback / softback
- ISBN
- 9781935567608
- Publish Date
- Aug 2016
- List Price
- $32.50
Classroom Resources
Where to buy it
Description
Understanding our sensory processing ability helps us to understand our likes, dislikes, and the strategies we use to help keep ourselves in a calm, alert state. This calm, alert state is necessary for learning! Knowing how to stay regulated is a life skill.
The Sensory Detective Curriculum is a resource that can be used to enable children to learn and understand this skill. Opening this discussion can help us understand how tensions rise, how bullying happens, and how children can become lonely, isolated, and misunderstood. Each chapter has fun activities for students to not only deepen their understanding, but to apply it to their own classroom.
The Sensory Detective Curriculum enables students to discover sensory processing and how it supports attention, focus, and regulation skills. Learning adventures include:
the neurology of sensory processing,
how sensory processing supports the nervous system to pay attention and focus, and
how emotion is connected to sensory processing and regulation.
Each chapter has fun activities for students to not only deepen their understanding, but to apply this understanding to their own classroom.
About the authors
Paula Aquilla loves the practice of Occupational Therapy and Osteopathy! She is a graduate of the University of Toronto and has practiced in a variety of clinical, home and community settings since 1986. Paula is also an osteopathic manual practitioner and specializes in paediatrics. She is the director of Aquilla Occupational Therapy (established in 1990); a family oriented practice that is full of fun and learning! Paula was the founder and director of Yes I Can! Nursery School, Yes I Can! Summer Camps, and the I Love My Baby programs in Toronto from 1990-1996. She was the founding director of Giant Steps Toronto. Paula brings warmth and enthusiasm in her work with children and their families. Paula currently consults at the Muki Baum Treatment Centres in Toronto and various schools in Toronto. She teaches throughout Canada, the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom, and India. Her practice encompasses all types of children and young adults and her specialty is sensory integration therapy. Paula has been a guest lecturer for the University of Toronto, McMaster University, and Humber College. She is published in the field: co-author of Building Bridges through Sensory Integration: Occupational Therapy for Children with Autism and other Developmental Disorders (1998) and is a contributor to Children, Youth and Adults with Asperger’s Syndrome. She is the technical editor for the SI Focus Magazine. Paula has contributed to other magazines and special interest newsletters in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom.
Excerpt: The Sensory Detective Curriculum: Discovering Sensory Processing and How It Supports Attention, Focus and Regulation Skills (by (author) Paula Aquilla & Alexi Edelstein)
Our brain can put all this information together to give us information about everything; what is happening in our bodies and what is happening in the environment. It’s absolutely marvelous! When we go outside for recess, we can feel our clothing as we move down the stairs toward the doors to the playground. We can keep our balance on the stairs and we know the position of our body, which enables us to turn around corners and make it through the doorway. Once we are outside, we scan the playground, using our vision and auditory systems and find our friends who are organizing a game of baseball. We switch from walking to running. We don’t fall because our vestibular and proprioception systems are working together to give us a constant flow of the information we need to stay upright. We may be biting into an apple and tasting that yummy goodness at the same time! We make it to our friends and begin to play.
Sensory processing happens in a part of our central nervous system called a brain stem. The brain stem is like a relay station; all the information is carried to the brain stem through individual sensory nerves. The information from all the senses gets filtered in the brain stem. Important information comes into focus and unimportant information is discarded. The brain stem works with another system called the limbic system, our emotional system, to determine what is important to pay attention to and what to ignore in that moment. For example, when we are going down the stairs, information from our vestibular, proprioceptive, tactile and visual systems come to the forefront to ensure that we don’t fall. We don’t pay as much attention to our olfactory or gustatory systems in this task. However, on pizza day, when we are eating a delicious slice of hot cheesy pizza, our brain pays more attention to our olfactory and gustatory systems so that we can enjoy the taste of the pizza.
