Fifteen years ago I went to a museum exhibit on Reggio Emilia teaching methods that I still think about once a week or so. (Reggio Emilia is similar to Montessori in that it is child-led exploration but different in that encourages multiple cross-modal forms of expression to aid comprehension.)

The Reggio Emilia exhibit featured children performing a cross-modal exercise of drawing the sounds of various types of shoes walking down stairs to illustrate the "Hundred Languages of Children" concept. It showed how kids translate auditory experiences into visual ones - high heels would been drawn with spikey patterns and construction boots would be big wavey ones. This is reminiscent of the Bouba-Kiki effect. But other smaller nuances such as duration translating to span and loudness to magnitude.

I took away a fascinating insight from childhood cognition: children effortlessly bridge sensory modalities, an ability that often diminishes in adults to the point that asking an adult to “draw this sound” or “build something that feels like this smell” is met with a blank look but which a child is often completely game to try. Tasking an adult with a cross-modal assignment literally does not compute.

This cross-modal perception revealed that children possess a remarkable synesthetic intuition, using diverse forms of expression to understand and interpret the world—an ability I had completely forgotten as an adult, which hindered my communication with young children in early education environments.

It highlighted the importance of nurturing cross modal communication styles and once one notices it (like in say Mr. Rogers opening ritual to use multiple queues to engage children’s parasympathetic nervous system) one unlocks a whole new vocabulary with not just children but adults. It’s been a powerful tool in my creative toolbox since.