What part do you think teacher confidence plays in teachers taking the initiative to adapt curriculum?

Critical Thinking Question

1. What part do you think teacher confidence plays in teachers taking the initiative to adapt curriculum?

Teachers understand that sensory play provides a perfect context for exposing children to both familiar and unfamiliar materials that challenge them to process and organize stimuli through their senses. Children use their sense of touch to explore textures, surfaces, and weight/pressure. They acquire depth perception, learn to differentiate between colors and shapes, and develop a sight vocabulary of objects and eventually words through visual processing. They learn to distinguish tone, pitch, and volume through hearing. As a sense of smell develops, children learn to identify and classify odors, acquire preferences, and acquire an “early warning system” for things that might not be good for them. Their sense of taste is closely correlated to smell; exposure to a wide variety of foods encourages discernment of the sweet, sour, salty, or bitter qualities of foods.

The process of converting sensory inputs helps the brain grow and become more efficient (Rushton, 2011). In this section we discuss open-ended sensory play in two areas common to many early childhood settings, sand/water (sensory) tables and exploratory activities withlight.