“5 senses for kids Foundation” aims to organise and support any educational, cultural, social or scientific action that contributes to the development of children by promoting multi-sensoriality as a fundamental basis for their development and their openness to the world.
Through sensory information, children build their brain
Children have an innate thirst to discover the world. They instinctively know how to use their senses to progress and act more effectively. Their curiosity is the cradle of their learning. Offering multi-sensory experiences in the first years of life allows the development of children’s brain.
Children learn to use sensory information that their brain receives. They enable them to analyse and understand the world around them. They give it meaning so that, ultimately, they can adapt their behaviour effectively.
Initially very complex, the world will gradually become organised in his head. They can test, validate or refute interpretations in the course of his successive experiences. To do this, children are equipped from birth with cerebral toolboxes. They are both sensory and cognitive. They have to make them work, in a favourable environment, to consolidate them and make the most of them.
At birth, this task is difficult, as the brain is very immature. But thanks to their multisensory learning, they gradually develop these tools and learn to use them
The role of play in this learning process is crucial.
Helping children to exercise their 5 senses
Children instinctively know how to use their five senses, and many other information that their body provides, to understand things, beings and situations.
By taking care to avoid any over-stimulation, we can help them effectively by offering sensory activities. These show him the richness and diversity of possible perceptions that each of his senses provides.
This learning is particularly useful for smell, touch and taste, which are wrongly considered to be minor senses compared to vision and hearing.
It is essential to accompany children in their sensory discoveries to help them structure their brain.
And it is essential to provide a secure environment with a benevolent outlook. In this way, a child feels confident. A safe environment allows the toddler to explore his or her surroundings while giving free rein to his or her curiosity. Curiosity is the cradle of learning.
In practice, we rarely use only one sense. Our conceptualisation is almost always based on the use of several senses. We perceive the world and things through a multimodal perception.
Thanks to this multimodal perception, children build memory, attention, the formation of mental categories, etc.
Let’s take an example: an orange is defined by its colour, the texture of its skin, its smell, its sweet and sour taste, etc.
All these sensory facets converge to form the overall concept of the fruit. This concept is much more precise than that which would come from a single sense. By becoming aware of the multisensory aspect of natural objects, children are equipped with concepts and words to better apprehend reality.
The challenge of perceiving reality
The five senses and multi-sensoriality contribute to the blossoming of children, to their development and their openness to the world, but their influence is decisive in the perception that the child will integrate of the world.
It is the image that our brain constructs that is our image of the world.
The perception of the reality of the world around a child is determined by the sensory information he or she has experienced. If children do not develop their multisensoriality, their conception and reality of the world will be more restricted. This will make them more vulnerable to false impressions.
All studies show that children are already out of the sensory learning phase by the age of three to four. We must therefore address children in the first 1000 days when the brain is still forming. In the very early years, sensory awareness is crucial.
“5 senses for kids Foundation” is committed to building tomorrow’s society with you.
Overexposure to screens threatens the sensory and cognitive development of our children. Screens mobilise two senses in an invasive and hypnotic way and the others are put aside. Children no longer touch. They no longer smell. They no longer taste.
The algorithms always push the same things, so it leads to poor experiences. Yet it is diversity that arouses our curiosity, feeds our creativity, builds our imagination and makes us memorise
Our recent pandemic context leads to isolation.
Supporting multi-sensoryity for the youngest children means that the future generation will be curious, creative, open to others and fulfilled
The mission of “5 senses for kids Foundation” is to organise and support any educational, cultural, social or scientific action that contributes to the development of children by promoting multisensoriality as a fundamental basis for their development and their openness to the world.
