Sensory Play for the brain 🧠

Importance of Sensory Play

From birth to early childhood, children use their senses to explore and learn the world around them. They do this by touching, tasting, smelling, seeing, moving and hearing.

Providing opportunities for children to actively use their senses through ‘sensory play’ is crucial to brain development – it helps to build nerve connections in the brain’s pathways.

Sensory play also helps the child to complete more complex learning tasks and supports cognitive growth, language development, gross motor skills, social interaction and problem solving skills.

 

What is sensory play?

Picking things up and feeling their texture is what people often think what sensory play is, but it’s much more than touch.

Sensory play includes any activity/ toy that stimulates a young child’s senses of touch, smell, taste, sight and hearing, as well as anything which engages movement and balance.

Sensory activities & toys encourage children to explore and investigate. Furthermore, these activities support children to use the ‘scientific method’ of observing, forming a hypothesis, experimenting and making conclusions.

Sensory Bin

With playgroups and kindergartens closed you can still provide lots of sensory experiences for your little one at home.

The easiest way to do this is to set up a sensory bin at home and fill it with different things to keep your little one (and their hands) busy!

1. Get a large container or bucket- it should be shallow and wide
2. Fill the container/bucket with a filler such as rice, pasta, beans, sand…etc
3. Add some fun tools like little scoops, spoons, cups, funnels. This encourages your little one to practice their fine motor skills by scooping, filling and pouring things around
4. Have a theme- it can be seasonal, holiday, colors, animals… the ideas are endless! With CNY coming up you can do a CNY themed sensory bin by filling it with red and gold things, gold coins, red packets, ribbons!
5. Small items may be choking hazards for little ones, so please always supervise.
6. Engage with them and describe the different things they play with to promote their language skills!

Please do share what sensory activities your little ones enjoy doing by tagging us! @happybatonhk