Contents
Many parents associate toddlers’ learning with flashcards, memorizing the alphabet, and reading stories. Although they can provide toddlers with a valuable amount of information about the world, when it comes to learning about the environment, sensory play is unrivalled. While the sensory play has been here since the dawn of time and is frequently a natural occurrence for young children, many parents are still confused about what it is and how it might be important for their child.
What Is Sensory Play?
Sensory play is a play in which your toddler activates and stimulates his or her senses. Because those senses are the most accessible, sensory play frequently focuses on engaging touch, sight, and hearing. Children interact with the world largely through their five senses when they are very young (touching, tasting, hearing, seeing and smelling). Of course, as your energetic toddler will demonstrate, they interact with the world through movement and balance. These senses are how they learn about their surroundings and make sense of all the new things they encounter every day. Children begin to play as they grow older, and through play, they learn more about the world around them.
Why Is Sensory Play Important?
Children experience rapid development and growth in their first three years of life. As they grow, they are capable of memorizing a vast amount of information they use as working knowledge for their environment. Sensory play provides youngsters with a one-of-a-kind opportunity to interact with the world in a way that promotes their growth and development. This type of active play aids in the formation of neural connections in the brain, allowing for the development of increasingly complex thoughts and tasks.
Sensory Play Ideas and Activities
Sensory Table and a Toddler Activity Center
A sensory table is a table with bins that parents can fill with various items to create sensory learning opportunities for their children. Sensory tables can be used in a variety of ways. Parents can select objects based on colour (a banana, a lemon, dandelion flowers, yellow felt or fabric balls, a rubber duck, and so on) or type (natural objects – leaves, bark, pinecones, mud, grasses, flowers, pebbles, and so on). They can even make a baby activity table out of edible items so that toddlers can learn through taste. Another great option for sensory learning is baby activity centres. Parents can use the toddler activity center for developing curiosity by providing a safe, secure environment for babies to explore textures, motions, sights, and noises, as well as practice critical fine motor skills such as pincer grasping, reaching, gripping, and shaking.
Finger Painting
Your child may utilize their creativity and imagination while learning via sensory experience by finger painting. Finger painting appeals to a variety of senses. Colour selection helps them build their vision. While mixing paints by hand, they develop their sense of touch. When painting an image, they employ their vision and touch. They improve their hearing through listening to their parents for assistance and criticism. Fine motor abilities, coordination, and creativity are also developed.
Simon Says
Simon Says is a fun and competitive game that helps kids improve their listening skills and body awareness. Children learn best by playing when they are toddlers. Simon Says is a game that helps children improve their listening and body awareness. They’ll learn to pay attention, focus, and use short-term memory as they learn to listen carefully, follow instructions, and engage their attention, focus, and short-term memory.
Calming Bottles
When a child’s life feels out of control, it’s natural for them to become overwhelmed and act out their deepest feelings. If you’re looking for a technique to calm down your child while they’re experiencing strong emotions, a calming bottle can assist. An old water bottle, water, transparent glue, food dye, and glitter are all you’ll need to make a relaxing bottle. Fill the bottle halfway with water and clear glue, add a few drops of food colouring and a few shakes of glitter before glueing the lid closed. When your child is upset, they can shake the bottle and then take deep breaths while watching the glitter settle at the bottom.
Homemade Musical Instruments
Creating their instruments is another fun sensory activity, toddlers adore. Simple things that can be found throughout the house will be of great assistance for creating a band’s worth of instruments. Consider making maracas with dried beans, a paper cup, and some wax paper or a guitar from an empty tissue box and some rubber bands.
Frozen Toys
It can be difficult to teach a toddler about hot and cold, but with a little ice and some little toys, your little one will have a ball experiencing these sensations on their own. Simply freeze some little toys (such as action figures) in ice and then let your child move the ice with their hands until the things are free. You may also give kid-friendly ice-cracking tools as well as warmer water to melt the ice. Because this exercise can become a little messy, it’s better to do it outside on a hot day, perhaps when you’re already getting the baby pool out.
Water Play
Water play allows your child to engage in sensory play with their entire body if they don’t mind getting wet. Fill up your baby pool and give them a few cups, balls, and other household items to play with in the water. If you don’t have a baby pool, simply fill a couple of tubs or pots with water and let them pour and splash as much as they like!
What’s That?
Children are very often full of questions. Allow them to be the ones to figure out the answers this time by playing a guessing game. Keep an object hidden but make a sound with it — crinkling paper, pushing buttons on a toy, bouncing a ball — and ask your youngster to guess what it is that is creating the noise. Alternatively, encourage them to guess strong but familiar scents such as fruit, onions, coffee, or flowers using their sense of smell.
Mud Kitchen
If you and your toddlers enjoy the idea of cooking but prefer the mess outside, consider letting them set up a mud kitchen in the yard and create recipes from whatever they can find in nature. You’ll be shocked how long they’ll happily bake mud cakes if you give them a couple of pots and pans, some water, and a mixing spoon.
Jumping Fun
Jumping is an excellent way to expend energy while also stimulating your child’s sense of movement. Jump ropes, small exercise trampolines, and sitting on an exercise ball are all excellent ways to incorporate jumping movements. Set up an obstacle course for your child that requires them to climb and jump over little things along the route. Outside using sidewalk chalk and small rocks or toys, or inside with blankets, pillows, and stuffed animals as obstacles and passageways.
You might also like
