Sensory room helps special-needs students in Florida

From The Miami Herald: The new sensory room at Hollywood Park Elementary School in Hollywood, Fla., is part classroom, part indoor playground. Special-education teachers hope spots like this will help calm anxious kids and stimulate nonresponsive ones during the school day. It's one of a handful of similar rooms in South Florida that stem in part from a 1970s Dutch philosophy known as Snoezelen (pronounced snooze-a-lun), which says surroundings can have a meaningful impact on behavior -- like reducing stress and improving communication among elderly patients with dementia, children with autism and people with developmental disorders.