A Touching Experience

An interesting thing about working with children is the process of rediscovering concepts we take for granted as adults and seeing them through fresh eyes. One unit of study that always has this effect on me, at least temporarily, is learning and teaching about the five senses. Most of us go about our day seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and touching without giving it much thought unless the normal workings get gummed up somehow--we burn our tongue on something hot, our sinuses are bothering us, we sit a little too close to the speaker at some performance--and then we notice the absence rather than the presence of what our senses have to say. And they all seem to have very specific jobs in terms of when we need and use them most. Although scent is certainly the most compelling of the five senses for memory retrieval, I don’t think touch can be beat for providing comfort. All of my kids developed tactile ways of making themselves feel better, or at least less scared or overwhelmed. Connor was such a dedicated hair twirler that the first night of his first very short haircut (which he requested), he cried himself to sleep and wouldn’t let us cut his hair short again for years. And Keilana still rubs her ears sometimes when she gets tired or nervous. Touch just does what we need sometimes. In Yoyo Books’ Fluffy Wild Animals, each page has soft fur to touch. Sometimes we read it twice just because.

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