A Child’s Extrasensory Experience
Sensory Enhancement in the Primary Classroom
We all teach our primary students lessons in sensory perception. We provide refined examples of colors and shapes, sounds and smells, textures and weights and use these to bring the pertinent language into common, daily use. The Montessori primary equipment set, in particular, approaches sensory training very deliberately, with exercises in color, smell and taste, pitch, timbre, volume , texture, temperature, shape, weight and volume, silence and phonetics.
The reality is that the child lives, as do grown-ups, in a universe that also exists in ways well beyond our senses and yet have direct causal significance to us. Sunburn, for example. We simply are not wired for much that exists. We do not perceive, the full range of some phenomena, such as light. We lack specific sensory organs for other phenomena, such as electrical fields.
We can enhance the child’s sensory training and significantly deepen her basic skill set by indicating the existence of our wider extrasensory world. This is done by providing hand tools that use static electric and magnetic fields to move, charge and induce various objects and materials. See A Child’s Electricity and A Child’s Magnetism. The idea is further expressed with the electromagnetic spectrum. See A Child’s Light.
In addition to enabling the child to do things, we can enable the child to realize energies exist, changes are happening. We use cause and effect to indicate the presence of phenomena. For example, we can connect an LED to a simple ac generator and make the LED flash by spinning the generator magnet with our fingers, both causing and indicating the presence of electricity inside the wire of the coil. We can use liquid crystal, heat sensitive film to watch the heat flow in an object we cannot touch. We can see the lines of force in ferrofluid as we move a magnet around it. We can see infrared imagery with readily available digital sensors. We can use litmus paper to indicate the chemical state of various substances.
Causal sensors can then be refined by matching them with scales or hash marks, that can be counted. Such scales can be used to count increments of electrical potential, magnetic strength and direction, light, heat and sound intensity, etc. Sensors that also quantify are meters. Meters measure. Measurement is the concrete basis of mathematical description. Meters can be both analogue and digital at the primary level.
A Familiar Example of Enhancement
Perception of differences in weight, the Baric sense, which along with balance and centrifugal force is an example of Proprioception, provides a relatable example of what I am going to call Sensory Enhancement. Sensory enhancement is the use of a tool or device to realize the presence of a particular phenomenon or property, refine that awareness, acquire vocabulary and measure or quantify. Many classrooms provide organized experience in judging weights of objects by hand: matching and ordering by feel, a group of objects identical in shape and size.
Excellent exercise, but at some point, circumstances such as size, motion, state of matter or energy, and the need for precision will begin to require the use of tools. We don’t estimate how much water we have by scooping a handful, we use measuring cups. One classic technological enhancement that most teachers find acceptable and do provide, are scales. Scales use cause and effect plus a second sense, vision, to refine Baric perception. Be it a cheap, inaccurate plastic imitation or a precision triple beam device, scales appeal to the child’s sensitivity to motion and moving parts. Scales also challenge dexterity and hone the innate Baric sense just by regular handing of varying weights and their association with numbers. Scales provide, precision, information and awareness beyond the unaided senses.
This article suggests a number of other Sensory Enhancements, some of which might seem counter intuitive in early childhood and elementary periods. They are derived from the context of A Child’s Physics and are completely within the child’s abilities.
Remember not knowing.
We adults have extensive experience and varying conceptual constructs that inform us about what exists when our immediate senses cannot. We’ve all seen images of the Electromagnetic Spectrum, though quite possibly not until high school. Let’s leave those ideas behind and take a memory tour of the child’s extrasensory world and consider what lies beyond his or her senses. We grownups do still live in that extrasensory world as well, and the reasons are both circumstantial and biological.
Circumstantial Sensory Limits
- Things too large. At some point the shear size of something takes it beyond the limits of our senses. A train too long, the highway past the horizon, the number of grains of sand on a beach, a school building, the Earth itself. Sometimes we can approach this limitation by examining a sample and extrapolating, more often the most informative and immediate experience is through photography.
- Things too far, or too small. These can be grouped together because of the apparent decrease in size due to distance. The sensory enhancement needed for both is the same, lenses and digital imagers.
- Things contained inside other things. Electricity in a wire, water in a buried pipe. Rooms down a hallway. Anything in a box with a lid. Something in my pocket. The inside of our own bodies. Optical fibers are useful here as are strong light and stethoscopes. X-ray and ultrasound images are readily available.
- Things concealed behind, opacity. We are not born knowing what exists behind our own backs and this provides the basis for many games in childhood. We do not have x-ray eyes and so do not know what is on the other side of a tree or behind our mother’s hands or above a water line if we are far enough below it. Mirrors and again, optical fibers come into play here.
- Things hidden in plane sight, transparency and darkness. If a material does not reflect a sufficient amount of light we will not perceive it, for instance, a piece of glass in water or air. Birds have this problem with windows. A special case is objects that have the same reflectivity, objects with monotone coloring, say, black on black or black in shadow. Variable light sources, filters, shadows themselves and non-optical sensors are useful here. The reflectivity of sound is also important, especially in the animal world.
- Events too fast or slow. Processing time is an issue. We all know plants grow toward the light, we just can’t hold still long enough to see them do it. We could look straight at a passing bullet and not know it has passed. A hummingbird’s wings are not individual body parts, they are a seemingly solid, translucent blur. High speed and time lapse photography are the appropriate enhancements.
- Proprioception,the perception of our own body’s location, orientation, motion and the forces and fields applied to us as discreet entities in open space. As an example centrifugal force, that sense of being pinned to a spinning merry-go-round, can be refined and conceptualized by external experiment, simply by spinning a tube containing oil and water on a string. Or again, the feel, the force, of wind on your face can be refined with an anemometer, which can be made out of straws and cups.
- Things hidden by association with other things, that is, telling the part from the whole. This is something adults tend to overlook and it is important. Recall from A Child’s Physics that the perception of discreet objects in open space is a learned behavior, which is the reason exercise with simple geometric shapes is so important. Sensory perception of complex shapes is a challenge we still face in adulthood. We encounter situations in which we cannot discriminate the details, the components of a system, we do not know they’re separate properties and we do not even know their names. I suggest a high bred car engine or the inside of your phone as examples. And remember, this is the child’s regular daily experience.
The child does not perceive separate parts as such. A bicycle gear cluster will seem to be a single thing until the child sees and handles one that is disassembled.
Enhancements of this type include the presence of moving parts and the act of disassembly. Sharpen a pencil then take the a pencil sharpener apart; or an egg beater. There is a great attraction and sensitivity to moving parts, just as there is a sensitive period for language. This is because of what moving parts reveal: changes in Energy, motion, light and sound; Separateness. Combinations of things that do not have separate part behaviors are particularly difficult. These are alloys and mixtures. We do not see the iron and carbon, we just see steel: we need to be shown the two elements and then the two being combined. We do not see the red and blue food dye in the purple water. We can, however, separate them out with a paper towel.
Heightened awareness of separate parts through moving parts, perception of the energy of motion, elevates early childhood curriculum from simple static object manipulation to a dynamic energy oriented environment.
Biological Sensory Limits
These are the things human beings simply are not hard wired to perceive.
- Electrical charges and fields. Sufficiently large potential differences can be realized through cause and effect, say, the movement of hairs on your forearm due to static electricity. Electricity can transform into other perceptible energies, light, heat and sound, but we do not have an electrical sense organ. We cannot tell directly if a wire is hot or not, or discriminate amounts of voltage, current or resistance.
- Magnetic fields. Many living creatures orient and navigate by magnetic field. Humans are not among them.
- Light above or below the visible spectrum, about 390 to 700 nano-meters. Near infrared and ultraviolet are the most accessible by sensory enhancement. Although, tuning a radio would rightly be considered the use of a lower frequency sensor.
- Sound above and below about 20 to 20,00 hz, optimal healthy human hearing, something that diminishes with age. Infra and ultra sound can be presented through basic sensors, as can volume, for which we also have a limited range.
- Heat, above and below burn/freeze limits, which for the child is a much narrower range than the adult. Thermometers both contact and non-contact enhance this sense, as do liquid crystal films and thermal imaging all of which can be placed in a primary classroom.
- Motion. Simple motion detectors can be used to reveal movement and vibration that would otherwise go unnoticed. Something as simple as a glass of water can reveal vibration we cannot perceive. More advanced sensors can break motion down to distance, speed and acceleration. Sensors also can be used as switches in simple circuits providing cause and effect demonstrations.
- Scent. Animals have us here as well. The only viable enhancement is to increase the intensity of an odor until it can be perceived. There is not even a conclusive definition of a unit measure of intensity. The gustatory sense can be exercised and extensively refined but it remains an art form taught with examples.
Sensory enhancements
The purpose of sensory exercise is to refine the child’s inherent capabilities. The purpose of enhancement is to provide extrasensory experience. We can organize it into four categories.
1. Prepared images: illustrations, photography, videography and interactive imagery:
2. Cause and effect activities: reactant materials, filters, reflectors, light scattering
3. Devices and sensors: simple to operate, aligned with the curriculum presented in A Child’s Physics. Activities and devices serve two functions: proof through cause and effect, and the association of language and numbers with the particular phenomenon. Though just learning to understand it, young children are very aware of cause and effect because it manifests through changes in energy. Things happen and can be repeated.
Separate sensors for each of the separate forms of energy should be used to sharpen awareness of each form in and of itself. However, many of these functions can and should also be combined into a single digital device, i.e., a tablet or smartphone, a Star Trek tricorder, if you like. It is important to recognize these devices as measuring and recording tools rather than just entertainment and social media.
Various apps can present direction, levelness, electrical and magnetic fields, aspects of light, sound and motion, metal detection, recording capacity and access to digital imagery. There are also external sensors that can be easily and economically added.
There is absolutely no reason that a child cannot point a digital microscope at some snow in a dish and watch in detail as crystals turn to liquid. A thermal imager can be placed in a fixed position so as to not be roughly handled and items can be brought to it; a thermal mirror, if you will. This one of the most vivid and informative enhanced experiences of the extrasensory world we can offer the child. Furthermore, a school can be equipped with everything suggested in this article for well under $1,000.00.
Here is a practical classroom example of a classic sensory exercise in Vibration and Pitch, digitally enhanced.
In early childhood education there is a great and pointless debate about the nature of acceptable enhancements. Namely that electric, electronic or digital tools, especially if they involve video screens, are inappropriate in the primary classroom given the preoccupation, the abuse of time spent, that older children and adults have with their devices which is, in fact, a significant problem. But denying the child the opportunity to use digit tools is rather like contending that food preparation is inappropriate because society has an obesity problem. These devices are ubiquitous in the child’s real world environment. They should not be ignored in the prepared educational environment.
4. Context: these devices, and all sensory enhancement, should be presented and talked about in a real world context to which the child can willingly relate. One of the child’s favorite contexts is Animals. The sensory prowess of animals is well documented, easily googled and fun to research and present. I will encourage you with a few examples.
A hammerhead shark senses electrical fields with the ampullae of Lorenzini in its hammerface.
An octopus has an enhanced sense of touch.
Elephants hear infrasound.
We can give the child tools that reveal the existence of a world beyond our senses, but Animals show the child that we are actually living in it.
