Multimodal Games Based On Sensory Exploration Of Early Childhood Self-Awareness: A Mind-Body Integrations Approach

Abstract

Indonesian early childhood curricula position self-awareness as a learning outcome, yet classroom practice remains dominated by verbal instruction and worksheets that separate bodily experience from the process of knowing oneself. This gap leaves open the question of how deliberately designed sensory experiences may serve as an entry point for children's emerging self-awareness. This study aims to describe and analyse how multimodal play grounded in sensory exploration is designed, enacted, and interpreted by teachers and children within a mind-body integration framework in an early childhood setting. A qualitative approach with a single instrumental case study design was employed at TK Sains Batani, involving two classroom teachers, one principal, four parents, and sixteen children aged 5–6 years in Group B. Data were gathered through eight weeks of passive participant observation, semi-structured interviews, a Likert-scale teacher questionnaire, and documentation. Analysis combined reflexive thematic analysis with data reduction, display, and verification. Three principal findings emerged: sensory experiences verbally named by teachers became a bridge for children to label their bodily and emotional states; a play rhythm moving from activation to calming cultivated children's recognition of their own comfort thresholds; and self-awareness surfaced most strongly when children were granted the right to refuse or modify a stimulus. The study contributes a Sensory-Naming-Regulation framework as an operational model linking bodily experience to the formation of self-concept in early childhood education.