A Canadian child care center has seen a dramatic improvement in children’s behavior and their readiness to learn since adding a Snoezelen room with the help of School Specialty.
Snoezelen multisensory environments are relaxing spaces that help reduce anxiety using features such as gentle lighting, soothing sounds, and calming textures. They also engage and stimulate users with sensory inputs designed to promote independence by giving users a sense of control over their environment.
Snoezelen rooms are especially helpful for people with sensory processing disorders, such as children on the autism spectrum. The Glengarry Child Care Society serves a large number of children with special needs, and the organization’s management team partnered with School Specialty, a leader in designing, furnishing, and equipping Snoezelen environments, to meet these children’s social-emotional requirements.
“We don’t shy away from accepting children with high needs into our care,” says Executive Director Brad West.
The project
The Glengarry Child Care Society takes care of more than 180 children from infants through school-age youth in Edmonton, Alberta. Most of these are preschool-age children who attend all day, and the rest come after school and during vacations.
In 2019, the organization teamed up with School Specialty to create an indoor gym for children to work off excess energy. When the child care center received a federal grant in 2023, officials decided to use this money to create a Snoezelen room that would help overstimulated children calm down and refocus.
West and his colleagues worked with School Specialty Account Manager Teresa Gainey, sharing their goals for the new space: They wanted a place where children could regulate their emotions when they felt angry, frustrated, or stressed out. “Many kids can easily be overwhelmed by the loudness of a child care environment,” West explained.
Gainey and other Snoezelen specialists designed a room that would achieve the center’s goals. The room includes equipment from School Specialty division FlagHouse, the sole vendor in the U.S. and Canada for Snoezelen products.
“We sent Teresa the room’s dimensions,” West says. “She worked her magic and came back with a fantastic design.”
The room design
Like most Snoezelen multisensory environments, Glengarry’s Snoezelen room combines audio, visual, and tactile elements to give children a calming sensory experience.
There are soothing elements to look at, such as a wall-mounted bubbling water panel that changes colors and a digital projector that shows images like dancing teddy bears, stars, flying airplanes, and a calming beach scene. An aroma diffuser distributes pleasant smells. A sound shell chair envelops children and blocks out exterior noise with soft music playing through speakers embedded in the chair. A fiber optic tactile panel engages users through vibrant lights and varied textures.
There are also proprioceptive inputs for helping children apply pressure and become more aware of their bodies. For instance, weighted plush toys provide both tactile and proprioceptive input throughout a child’s body to increase comfort and promote a sense of calm. A comfy “pea pod” looks like a canoe and inflates to provide pressure all around a user’s body. A “double squeezer” uses cushioned foam rollers attached to a wooden frame to apply deep pressure support as children squeeze themselves through the device.
With the Snoezelen room, “we can give children a safe and calming space to get away from the bustle of their day, where it’s quiet, and they can recenter themselves,” West observes.
The results
The Glengarry Child Care Society’s Snoezelen room has “exceeded the goals we had for the space,” according to West.
Children with behavioral challenges, social-emotional issues, and sensory processing disorders can spend time in the room either at a teacher’s suggestion or on their own. When they return to their regular classroom, they’re more focused and receptive to learning—and they engage in group play and activities with other children more effectively.
Many children struggle with transitioning from home to a child care environment, West adds. These children’s parents can take them into the Snoezelen room as a way to ease this transition before they join their peers in a regular classroom.
Not only is the room exceeding the center’s expectations, but the entire design and implementation process went very smoothly—to the point where West is looking at adding two mobile Snoezelen carts to bring sensory experiences to groups of students within each traditional classroom as well.
“Teresa and the entire School Specialty team have been incredible to work with,” West concludes. “From start to finish, it has been an amazing experience.”
