What is Sensory Play? Why is it Important?
- Sensory play includes any activity that stimulates your child’s senses: touch, smell, taste, sight and hearing.
- Toddlers and children process information through their senses. They learn through exploring with their senses.
- Sensory play helps children develop self esteem and boosts their confidence in decision making. The unstructured learning experiences allow the child to self-express, feel, control, change and experiment during play, as there is no right or wrong answer.
How to Support your Child’s Learning and Play
- During sensory play encourage your child to use words to describe their play experiences.
- Encourage the development of social skills by practicing turn taking, negotiation and sharing.
- Incorporate additional props that lend themselves to pretend play, to extend language and symbolic thinking.
Ideas to Try at Home
Touch
- Use materials such as dry pasta, shaving foam, sand or soapy water to create a sensory tub for your child to explore.
- Play games or engage in activities that require use of muscles (e.g., jump on a trampoline/bed, have three legged race, play leap frog or hopscotch).
- Explore textures when cooking with your child.
Sight
- Explore with colours (e.g.: add food colouring to cooked spaghetti and let it dry, paint each other’s face).
- Experiment with light around the house (e.g.: play with a torch, look though cellophane paper).
Hearing
- Play with musical instruments or sing/listen to songs.
- Play listening games (e.g.: talk about different animal sounds you hear).
Smell
- Make use of smells around your house (e.g.: the smell of flowers or wet grass in the garden, or baking smells in the kitchen).
Taste
- Try different tastes of foods (e.g.: sweet, sour, salty and bitter foods).
- Engage your child while you are cooking (e.g.: tasting and choosing different pizza topping, choosing fruits to make a smoothie).
Remember to keep it fun and flexible! Engaging in sensory play can be overwhelming for some children initially. Start slowly and support your child to join in gradually (e.g. if playing with shaving cream or slime for the first time, you might use utensils initially rather than expecting your child to touch it straight away, and it’s a good idea to have a wet towel close by to clean hands when it gets too much). Remember to give plenty of praise and encouragement when things are going well. It is also important to consider a good time and place to engage in sensory play as it can be quite messy!