Child Development, Brain Research, and Multisensory Learning

Why Use a Multisensory Approach?

If friends show you photographs they took on their vacation, you show polite interest. If they show you photographs of a place you have actually been to, you probably will have genuine interest. Reference points aid our recall of something we understand. If we look through our own photographs, they conjure up a moment, a feeling, an experience. Each photograph can bring to mind people, places, sounds, sights, smells, tastes, emotions, and other memories. The photograph is a trigger, a starting point, to retrieve a real experience.

Teachers are faced with many opportunities and challenging responsibilities. Our primary job is to provide education in the form of meaningful experiences. If our teaching does not mean something to our students, we are wasting both our time and theirs. We cannot rely on books and flat images to provide the kinds of hands-on experiences that will spur our students' growth.

Experts in brain theory believe that emotional experiences stimulate the brain, and this in turn helps us to retrieve stored information efficiently. If the emotional experiences are positive, learning will be a happy experience (Jensen 1998). We all know that if we feel good about something, we'll want to do it again. Our young children are natural scientists; they thrive on pleasurable hands-on discoveries. A well-prepared multisensory approach in the classroom can provide such positive, stimulating learning experiences.

I will take this one step further. Multisensory methods can be used to teach even very young children how to read and write. If we do this properly, we can prevent a huge amount of fear from building up in association with the written word.

After years of teaching older students, I now teach three-, four-, and five-year-old children in a prekindergarten class. Generally people are respectful and polite when they learn that I am a teacher. Then comes the question, "What age do you teach?" I have been horrified to discover that when I reveal the age of my students, the questioner's reaction changes to one of dismissal; some have even exclaimed to me, "Oh, not a real teacher!" The general perception of teachers of very young children is that we are mere babysitters; my day must be spent crawling around on the floor, just playing.

It is true that my day is full of happiness, and a good deal of it is spent crawling around on the floor, but I work just as hard as when I taught older students, and in fact, I spend more time now on preparation because I cover a wider variety of activities during the school day — and three-year-olds are not that great at waiting! A three-year-old may take 15 seconds to paint a story, whereas an older child may stay absorbed for 15 minutes writing an account.

Far from being dismissed, teachers of preschoolers should be hailed as the scene setters. This young and tender age is when it is all happening. We are helping to develop an incredible potential. A three-year-old is receptive, generally uncontaminated with negative emotions, eager and ready to learn. Just consider how much a baby has to master in the first two years of life. The rate at which he makes progress in physical skills, language, and relationships is astounding. If we continued to discover and learn at that rate, we could all make meaningful conversation with the likes of Einstein, even on an off day!

A newborn has more than a trillion neural connections in the brain. At its peak, the embryo is generating brain cells at a rate of 250,000 each minute, or 15 million each hour. Soon after birth, the brain starts to prune away unneeded cells and billions of unused connections. How do we grow cells rather than lose cells? The same way we would grow anything — we feed those cells. The food the brain likes best is challenging sensory stimulation (Jensen 1998). We, as teachers of the young, need to ensure that the nutrition we provide is packed with a wide range of wholesome goodness: lots of positive multisensory adventures.

Child Development Studies

Let's take a brief look at child development studies, using Jean Piaget's theory about the stages of growth (Williams 1969). Piaget noted that each phase of development has its roots in the previous phase, and children move through the phases consecutively; they cannot jump from phase 1 to phase 5. This explains the source of the problems of many special-needs children. A piece of their developmental comprehension is lacking, which adversely affects everything that comes after. If early educators provide a plethora of experiences to enhance a child's understanding at every stage, taking a multisensory approach, we will be more likely to cover the needs of our children. The phases of development, as described by Piaget, are detailed in the chart at right.

The critical stage for us, phase 2, is the optimum time to introduce the code of written language. Children may not yet be able to physically reproduce what they can comprehend, but we can plant the seeds and tend the garden during this time when the mind is beginning to organize. In this preconceptual stage, two- to four-year-olds are gathering information about their environment to be used at a later stage; older children who are still in this phase of development are also gathering information for the next. Some children have limited experiences, and they cannot build on what is not there. We must provide experiences for them — memorable, hands-on experiences.

Brain Research

How do we learn? In essence, the brain rewires itself with each new stimulation, experience, and behavior. Each stimulus is sorted and processed on several levels. When a new task is initiated, many areas of the brain are activated. As we learn a task better, we use less of our brains for that task.

As the brain receives new information, impulses flow from the cell body down the axon. Most axons are about one centimeter long. The longest, in the spinal cord, are about one meter. Each axon branches repeatedly to pass information to other cells. Information is passed through the synaptic gap between the axon and the dendrites of the next cell. When the cell body sends an electrical discharge outward to the axon, it stimulates the release of stored chemicals into the synaptic gap.

As we repeat a learning experience, the neural pathways become more and more efficient as a fatty coating called myelin is added to the axons. This process is called myelination. The thicker the axon, the faster it conducts electricity and information. Myelination also reduces interference from other nearby reactions. When the environment is enriched, dendrites grow out and extend from the cell body (Jensen 1998).

The world is the brain's food: smells, sounds, sights, tastes, and touch all help to develop countless neural connections. In the...