We extend the Poincaré–Borel lemma to a weak approximation of a Brownian motion via simple functionals of uniform distributions on n-spheres in the Skorokhod space $D([0,1])$. This approach is used to simplify the proof of the self-normalized Donsker theorem in Csörgő et al. (2003). Some notes on spheres with respect to $\ell _{p}$-norms are given.