What is flexible seating?
- Traditional seats are replaced with seating arrangements that allow children to be more comfortable, improve their attention, and can stimulate a student’s need for sensory input
Benefits of flexible seating:
- Physical Health: Studies have shown, allowing flexible seating in a classroom improves work productivity and a child’s overall health
- Community: Encourages children to take turns in different locations and with different seating options
- Choice: Allows students to feel empowered by some some degree of choice and control over their environment, allowing them to choose where they want to work
- Comfort: Encourages students to find their best seating position to stay calm, focused, and productive
- Commitment to Learning: Allowing students to choose where they want to sit and giving them more control has shown to improve their commitment and student engagement to their learning process
- Collaboration: Allows students to quickly and easily pair up and work in small groups without moving heavy desks
- Communication: For this to be a successful process, the teacher will need to establish new classroom management tools including, creating a system to make seating choice fair and non-disruptive, but after this is implemented it allows the children then develop high level critical thinking and problem solving skills
- Sensory Input: Stimulates a students’ sense of touch which can help them focus and process information. Studies show that children who are more active exhibit better focus, faster cognitive processing, and more successful memory retention than children who spend their days sitting still. Keeping the body active promotes mental clarity by increasing blood flow to the brain, making activity vital to both learning and physical/neurological health
- Fun: Makes learning fun and exciting for a child by having a changing learning environment
Examples of flexible seating options:
- Round dynamic cushion that has one bumpy side and one smooth side
- It offers “active sitting” which strengthens the muscles that support the spine
- Helpful for decreasing fidgeting and increasing sensory and body awareness
Move ‘n’ sit Wedge Seat Cushion
- Inflatable dynamic air cushion which activates intrinsic truck muscles to support the spine
- The wedge shape encourages a seated posture with a forward pelvic position
- Smooth on one side while bumpy on the other allowing for sensory input
- Helps improve posture and a child’s concentration
- Provides dynamic seating, allowing movement while improving posture
- Heavy-duty solid rubber bungee cord
- Loops secure the pipes to the band to keep them from sliding off of the chair legs
- Children can rest their feet on the bouncy band instead of having them dangle and children who need active movement to focus on a task can use these to have their feet bounce and move
- Placing different weighted TheraBand’s around the legs of a child’s chair is an easy accommodation to help children maintain their focus while releasing energy through their feet using the bands
Attachable Foot Fidget Footrest
- A foot rest that attaches to the legs of a child’s desk
- The footrest provides the child with proprioceptive input to improve a student’s focus, attention, posture, concentration, and memory while expelling excess ‘fidgety’ energy
- Helps the child sit in a 90-90-90 ‘ready to learn’ seated position
- Helps ease the senses, soothe and calm the body
- Sit or squeeze on the cushion to activate the vibrations
- Assists the child in maintain their focus and ability to sit in one place for a long period of time
- Comes in different colors and patterns such as a soccer ball or jelly fish
- Improves concentration and the ability to retain information using this ball attached to a steel frame with 6 rubber feet
- Choice of different colors and sizes
- Has a gently rounded bottom which encourages movement while improving tone, posture, and position in space awareness
- Comes in a variety of sizes and colors
- Combines the benefit of sitting on a stability ball with the benefit of having wheels so the child can move around the classroom
- Increases a child’s concentration and improves posture
- Allows children to gently bounce while seated and encourage proper posture
- Comes in different colors and can be deflated while not in use
- Provides an active seating experience that helps encourage good posture, core muscle strength, and help increases concentration
- Allows the child to rock back and forth gaining vestibular and proprioceptive feedback to their bodies
- Conforms to the child’s body shape
- Provides proprioceptive feedback to the child’s body allowing them to receive the sensory feedback to know where their body is in space
- Provides a cushioned back to promote a proper and comforted seated position
- Gives proprioceptive feedback while the child is seated
- Provides proprioceptive and vestibular feedback while the child rocks back and forth in the chair
- Helps improve mood and energy levels while engaging in work
- Adjustable depending on a a persons height and can be alternated between a seated and standing position
- Elbows should be at a 90 degree angle, resting alongside the trunk
- Can lower risk of weight gain and obesity, may lower blood sugar levels, and risk of heart disease
- May appear to decrease lower back pain
