Explain why sensory perception activities are important for children of all ages

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

1.Sensory-specific activities enhance and challenge particular sensory modes, foster the development of selective focus, build discrimination skills, remedy sensory deficits, and create an enriched learning environment that encourages verbal communication, cognitive processing, and motor development.
2.Infancy is a critical time for sensory perception processing. When babies are deprived of one type of sensory information, because of a physical issue such as limited vision, hearing loss or sensitivity to touch, their future growth is affected. Visual deprivation in the first seven weeks of life results in impaired recognition of faces (Johnson & Mareschal, 2001). Hearing loss not corrected before six months affects the child's ability to classify and understand distinct sounds, hindering language development. Infants who are under-responsive to tactile stimuli show increased social and communication impairments as they mature.
3.Children who experienced sensory deprivation in infancy react adversely to sensory stimuli even twelve years later. Infants who receive infrequent touching from their mothers eat less and show slower physical growth. Preschoolers with below normal response to sensory stimuli, such as is found in some types of autism, are less able to understand the emotional state of other people.
4.Young children in this technological age spend less time outside, and are more likely to be sedentary in front of television and computer screens which, while visually compelling, do not provide the growth in learning as the physical experience of manipulating real objects in three-dimensional space.
5.Television viewing also affects parent–child interactions, vital to effective sensory processing. When adult-oriented television programs play in the background, parents become distracted and interactions with their children playing nearby reduce in quantity and quality and reduces hands-on sensory experiences for many young children.
6.Builds deep meaning. Deep meaning is built up over repeated sensory exposures in an emotionally positive context.