Five Sense Classrooms Make Sense by Jaime
Jaimeof Gresham's entry into Varsity Tutor's October 2014 scholarship contest
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Five Sense Classrooms Make Sense by Jaime - October 2014 Scholarship Essay
In everyone's life, at one point or another, they have struggled in school. It may have been an academic struggle or perhaps a social one. No matter how you look at it, school can be tough! Struggle is a part of life, at least that's what our parents told us when they were trying to comfort us and help us through a difficult situation. While we couldn't eliminate every struggle with a highly personalized classroom, we could definitely benefit from a few changes to the environment to help engage students in the learning process, including myself.
Engaging students in a classroom means involving them in the learning process. In order to do that, you must provide sensory activities that help any student, at any level, to successfully learn the subject being taught. Sensory activities are activities that are appealing to any one, or more of the five senses; sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste. Studies have proved that when you activate more than one sense during the learning process, a student will most likely remember the subject matter being taught. For instance, a science lab is hands-on, touch, smell, and hearing may be activated thereby causing the student to remember the subject of the lab better than if a professor or teacher taught it verbally.
In a classroom environment, where more than one of my senses are engaged, I enjoy learning more. If we could develop a classroom where activities that empower a person to use their senses to learn, would invite a journey of learning, rather than a responsibility of learning. Enjoying that journey is key to learning new material. Training teachers to develop activities that invite use of the five senses, would develop students who enjoy learning and could retain more of the information learned, for longer periods of time. Not only would I love to be a student in a classroom where my five senses were engaged, I would love to be a teacher in such a classroom.
