Sensory System
Our children process the world around them through their senses: sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch.
They will also process their world using these less well known senses:
- Vestibular system – which detects motion and gravity. It is used to maintain balance and orientation.
- Proprioceptive system – which is the body’s ability to sense location, movements, and actions. This allows us to do things without thinking about it or looking at what we’re doing, such as being able to touch our nose with our eyes closed.
- Interoceptive system – which is the sense of knowing what is going on inside our body. This includes things such as feeling: hunger, thirst, tired, pain, and needing to use the bathroom.
There are two things to keep in mind with our children’s sensory system:
- It is essential to incorporate as many of our children’s senses as possible when teaching them. Think about the Divine Liturgy, which is a teaching service. We are fully engaged in the service with all of our senses. We see the priest moving around and the icons on the walls. We hear the prayers and the jingle of the bells on the censer. We smell the incense drifting to heaven and the candles burning all around us. We kiss the icons and make the sign of the cross with our fingers. We taste Holy Communion and sometimes kolyva too. All of this is processed through our senses.
- As Orthodox Christians, we realize that there is a necessity to learn and use self control with our senses, but there is also a developmental necessity to have our children experience the world through the use of all of their senses. This is one of those moments when we strive to find that balance between not over indulging their senses and not under utilizing them either.
