Children love to learn through play, and sensory activities are a great way to do this. Sensory play is often spoken about as important for child development and learning. However, you may be wondering what it is and how it can benefit your child.
Sensory play refers to activities that engage any or all of your child’s senses. Throughout life, we depend on our senses to make decisions and understand our surroundings. For kids, engaging their senses through play develops their understanding of their environment and the world around them.
Sensory Activities to Try at Home
The Benefits of Sensory Play
Offers Opportunities to Try Something New
Sensory activities expose children to a wide range of new experiences. This helps them grow in confidence as they experiment with different textures, sights, sounds, and smells.
Encourages Mindfulness
Focusing on their senses and paying attention to what they see, feel, hear, smell, and taste are all excellent ways to encourage mindfulness. So, sensory activities are a great way to help kids focus their attention in the moment.
Lots of Fun
Most importantly, sensory play is lots of fun! As well as being crucial to your child’s development, sensory play activities provide hours of fun for kids to enjoy.
Sensory Play Activities to Try at Home
The great thing about creating sensory activities at home is you do not need expensive equipment. Therefore, you can enjoy a wide range of sensory activities using items you already have at home. With this in mind, here are some sensory play ideas to get you started:
Create a ‘Treasure Basket’ for Babies
Gather together household objects with different shapes and textures and put them into a basket. Next, supervise your baby for safety as they reach into the basket and explore each object through touch. Objects such as pine cones, ribbons in different colours, shells, clean makeup brushes, shaving brushes, and maracas are all great additions to your treasure basket.
Babies and young children love bubbles, so blowing some bubbles during your sensory activities will help to stimulate your little one’s senses even further. Blowing bubbles is also guaranteed to generate plenty of giggles along the way!
Discover Different Smells
Kids will love putting their sense of smell to the test and discovering different scents. Challenging kids to see if they can guess what each smell is without looking is great fun. Using foods and objects from around the home and garden makes this game really easy to organise. You can use herbs and spices such as cinnamon, rosemary, mint, and parsley, as these all have strong, distinctive scents. Rose petals from the garden, lemons, bananas, and even a bar of soap are also great items to sniff. Next, it is time to see how many your kids can guess correctly.
After completing your game, you will have an ideal opportunity to talk about the scents in more detail. To get the conversation started, you can ask questions such as; what do the kids associate with each smell? What does each smell remind them of? Do they think the smell is nice or stinky?
Experiment with Colour
Toddlers and older children will love getting hands-on with paints during a sensory session. But be warned, things can get a little messy! Experimenting with different paint colours and mixing them to ‘magically’ create new colours is loads of fun. If you are happy to embrace mess, you can also let the kids put their hands or feet in the paint. Children will love to feel the squelchy, sticky texture of the paint as they play.
Guess the Sound
Experimenting with sounds is a great opportunity to encourage your child to explore their sense of hearing. Create a fun sound game by getting your child to turn away from you or pop a blindfold on them. Next, use common household objects to make one noise at a time. Now see if your child can guess the noises. Ideas to try include running a tap, picking up keys, shaking a pack of rice or pasta, and crunching some cereal.
Play with Texture
Using a tray or a washing-up bowl and adding a layer of sand, cereal, or rice to the bottom is an excellent way for kids to play with texture. Children can get stuck into digging with a spoon and add toys such as animal figures or action figures to create their own world. This provides the perfect opportunity for sensory play and to let their imaginations run free.
