What is the Snoezelen Room?

Our Snoezelen room is a therapeutic environment for sensory stimulation. It is a white painted room, with white blinds and white flooring in which various types of specially designed equipment provides pleasant sounds and music, fascinating light displays, appealing aromas, contrasting textures and more to stimulate the senses and improve the quality of life for children with a variety of physical, cognitive, sensory and learning challenges. Snoezelen (pronounced ‘snooze-a-lun’) was developed in Holland and the name comes from a contraction of two Dutch words meaning ‘sniffing’ and ‘dozing’. The purpose of the Snoezelen Room at Blair Early Childhood Center is to provide age appropriate, ability appropriate and culturally acceptable activities in an enticing sensory environment where our students can relax and have fun while experiencing visual, auditory, tactile, vestibular, and olfactory stimulation that will help them attend to, comprehend, participate in, and enjoy the world around them.

As you step into Blair’s Snoezelen Room, you may smell gently perfumed air, hear soft instrumental music or nature sounds, see dreamlike images of clouds, stars or rainbows move across a white screen, colored bubbles cascading in transparent tubes and jewel-bright lights reflected in silver domes. You will feel the soft, springy surface of the wall-to-wall white matted floor, vibrations in rhythm with the music on a special acoustic mat and air and bean bag cushions on which children can recline.

Snoezelen sessions consist of pleasurably sensory experiences generated in an atmosphere of trust and relaxation. The sensory experiences are arranged to stimulate the primary senses at the most elemental level. Students enter the Snoezelen Room in small groups of two or three with at least two members of the school staff (teachers, therapists, or child welfare assistants) who help the children access and enjoy the various equipment.

Students have many opportunities to explore the environment, at their own pace, free from the expectations of others. Because the lights, sounds, and sensations are interactive, (students learn to control them by pushing buttons or stepping on switches) the students learn to control their environment while in a pleasurable setting. The sensory experiences are designed to stimulate the senses at all levels from passive enjoyment to active decision making.

The students who use the Snoezelen Room on a regular basis demonstrate improved responsiveness, improve capacity to relax, reduced levels of anxiety, better understanding of cause and effect relationships, increased vocalizations, increased limb movements, increased ability to track lights/objects, reduced tactile defensiveness, the ability to tolerate more frequent teacher interactions and more frequent eye contact.

Everyone at Blair is excited about our Snoezelen Room and the benefits it brings to our students. We constantly improve the quality of our Snoezelen program with state-of-the-art equipment and ideas for its use in enhancing learning, as well as applications for physical, occupational and speech/language therapy.