Hot Springs primary school gets a sensory room

HOT SPRINGS — A new sensory room at Lakeside Primary School is helping build confidence in K-4 students who have specific learning needs.

The school recently received a $5,000 Special Education Grant from the LEAF Foundation to transform one of its classrooms into a sensory room, which offers a specially designed environment catering to the sensory needs of a student, facilitating their participation in learning.

“The purpose of a sensory room is to help students to be able to regulate themselves and to be able to go through and get some energy out,” the district’s administrator over Special Services, Courtney Eubanks, said.

“And be able to do fun things within this area, you know, get them out of the classroom. Sometimes on the playground, if we’re not having recess at a certain time, they might need to go somewhere and be able to get their sensory needs met, and sometimes that is indoors,” she said.

Unlike a regular classroom, where students are expected to sit and listen to the teacher, a sensory room provides children with the autonomy to analyze the environment using their senses in their time. It features such equipment as compression swings, trampolines, crash pads, tunnels, and spinner seats.

“As you can see, it’s not a traditional-looking classroom,” Lakeside Primary School Principal Bambi Norman said.

“I think that helps students that have a lot of, maybe, anxiety, that worry about being in a traditional classroom, and this is more of a classroom where they can relax and be their self and find their area that they can work in and feel comfortable in.”

Norman said one thing she has noticed is a sense of pride and confidence students seem to feel when they are working in the classroom.

“When they are regulated, how proud they are that they have a room that they can come to with special things that they can work with,” she said. “Whether their therapist is here, or whether the classroom teacher is here with them. They know the stations they like to go to more than others, and you can just really see their self-confidence grow when they’re in here, and take that ownership in being in this classroom.”

Eubanks said they arranged the room in such a way that it was not overwhelming for the students. She said it is a process for teachers and therapists to identify which specific stations best suit each student’s needs.

“Learning what those sensory needs are, when you’re looking at a student in kindergarten through fourth grade, sometimes they know that they’re frustrated, they know that they need something, but they’re not sure what that is,” she said.

“And so is it that they need to come in and be squeezed? Or do they need to relax? Do they need to jump on the trampoline? Are they needing something, spinning, the vestibular, are they needing that? What is it that they need?”

Teaching the students how to go through the process, by the time they reach the upper-grade levels, she noted, they have an idea themselves of what helps or calms them.

“That’s the purpose of teaching our students through these stations,” she said.

Establishing the room is about being “proactive versus reactive,” she said, in that it is meant to help a student before they reach a level of frustration.

“Let’s give them what they need. And this is a daily deal. This isn’t something that they come to when they feel like it. So every day within the student schedule, they come into this room,” she said.

Eubanks and Norman said it was a team effort in creating the room.