Are you looking for ways to engage your baby or toddler? This post is for you!
Why Sensory Play?
Sensory play is so important for a growing developing child.
Infants and toddlers can always benefit from more play that will appeal to their senses and encourage exploration using their sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste. This is how they learn about the world!
What is Sensory Play?
Sensory play stimulates your little ones senses, the different ways we perceive the world. Our brain use the senses (taste, smell, sight, touch, and sound) to help us understand our surroundings and learn about our environment.
Particularly in the first year of life, when children are developing so quickly, sensory play is the best way for babies to develop their senses or process the world around them.
Virtually all types of play and activities can qualify as sensory play: from exploring the outdoors, to water activities, to experimenting by with food, and even exploring rooms and objects around the home.
Why is Sensory Play Important?
Sensory play encourages learning through exploration, curiosity, introspection, problem solving and creativity.
Developmentally, it helps babies to build nerve connections in the brain and encourages language acquisition and motor skills.
So much is going on in your little one’s brain during the first year of life. It may not seem like it, but their brain is constantly working every minute of the day, absorbing and processing the world around them to help them to understand it.
Sensory play is the ideal way for them to learn while being meaningfully engaged in activities designed to develop their motor skills, help them internalize and learn language, and to fortify their understanding of concepts and ideas.
Benefits of Sensory Play
There are many benefits to sensory play, especially in a child’s first few years of life. Some of them include:
- Stimulating the brain
- Creating neural pathways
- Improving sensory processing systems
- Improving social and soft skills
- Promoting language development and communication
- Improving co-ordination, fine motor and gross motor skills
- Improving mood
You can start sensory play as early as you want with your baby! Although they may not actively begin to engage with you until about 3-4 months old, as they grow they will be able to participate and benefit more meaningfully. This will make these activities fun for the both of you!
Why You Should Read to Your Baby from Birth!
Finding Ways to Incorporate More Sensory Play
So now that you know about all of the benefits of sensory play, I am sure you’re wondering how you can add more sensory play to your little one’s day.
I bet you are already engaging them in sensory play right now, maybe without even realizing it! However, you can always add more to help enrich their day and shake up their routine.
The great thing about sensory play is that there are endless activities that you can do with your baby, despite where you live, the season, the weather, your budget or other factors!
8 Ways to Add More Sensory Play to Your Day!
If you’re looking for ideas or want to shake up your existing routine, this post will share some ways that you can incorporate more sensory play into your little one’s day!
I have included all different types of activities that encourage use of the senses, including ones that cost nothing at all, to ones that require supplies.
Have fun trying out some of these ideas with your baby or infant, or let them encourage your creative mind to come up with some of your own!
1. Sensory Toys
Sensory toys are designed to stimulate one, some, or all of the senses. They might include elements such as bright or contrasting colors, appealing sounds, or different textures and fabrics.
These toys encourage play that motivates your little one to use their senses to learn and engage with the object.
Some examples for different age ranges include:
2. Morning and Evening Exploration Walks
The great thing about this sensory activity is that you can do it everyday, with little time and at no cost.
Start your day off by exposing your child to some fresh air, which will benefit them in many ways. Point out the sights around you: the sky, trees, buildings, flowers or whatever else is in your area.
Ask your baby to listen to what they hear, whether it is insects, birds, planes, cars or voices.
Next, find something that you can smell with them, like a flower or a fruit. Let them touch it afterwards. If possible, let them have a taste.
In just a short span of time you’ve managed to engage some, if not all, of their senses.
The same activity can be completed in the evening, before bed, which can become part of their bedtime routine.
Look out for the stars, clouds, or other familiar sights around you.
3. Nature Exploration
Children love exploring nature! So engage your little one’s curiosity by helping them to learn about nature using their senses. This activity can take on many forms.
One idea is to find a plant that contains leaves and flowers. Explain the difference to them, then pick one of each. Let them hold them, smell them, and look at them in depth. My 10 month old even tried to eat them, before I quickly intervene.
You can even bring them home to make an arts and crafts project later.
You can use the same strategy to explore just about every aspect of nature, including puddles, the beaches, trees, riverbeds and more.
This activity appeals to children of all ages, and you can adapt what you explore based on your child’s age.
4. Sensory Bags or Bottles
Sensory bags are homemade or purchased items that you can use to engage your little one’s senses.
They are very easy to make, you can simply use a storage bag, freezer bag or something similar, or alternatively an empty bottle. Then you can add virtually anything that you want them to explore. Think water, jello, sand, dirt, rice or peas as a base, and then small objects that they can see to make it fun.
One popular idea is to have a different sensory theme each day or week. For example, if you want your child to learn about colours, you may create a different sensory bag containing items of a certain colour every day of the week.
Or you may choose to use different types and sizes of dried peas to help them learn about varying sizes, shapes, textures, colours and sounds.
As I said, virtually anything can go in a sensory bag. Get creative! Use items around your home or buy some cool bright, contrasting or unique objects from the store to put in their bags.
You can also buy pre-made sensory bags or bottles. Here are some examples:
5. Splashing Fun
If your child is anything like my daughter and loves the water, they will love sensory activities that involve water. Try this one.
Fill a bucket or tub with water. Next add some object that’s you think they may enjoy inspecting. Anything can work. Some good examples are leaves, floating balls, shells or foam shapes. Again, you can use virtually anything.
They will love manipulating the various objects in water, while having fun splashing too.
You can make similar bins using dirt, sand or other bases.
Check out a pre-made sand sensory bin below:
6. Food Helper
Food sensory activities can be a lot of fun, but they can also get messy! That is all part of the excitement and learning for your baby or infant.
Choose a few foods that you can cut into different shapes, that evoke noticeable scents and that are colourful. Lay them out on a tray and let your little one have fun playing with each.
Engage in this activity with them and pick up each object. Smell it, squish it, taste it and then have them do the same.
This not only familiarizes them with different foods and can be a great learning activity for language acquisition, but it also exposes them to manipulating different food textures, smells, sights and taste, which will benefit your budding eater.
7. Sensory Books
Sensory books encourage the use of the senses by incorporating aspects that appeal to your baby’s hearing, touch or smell.
Reading is already such a great sensory activity that promotes the development of hearing and listening skills, and sight. By adding additional elements to appeal to other senses, reading becomes even more beneficial.
Sensory books may include touch features that incorporate various fabrics or textures, may have sniff pads, or could include music or voices. They come in all different sizes and styles, for various reading age levels.
Check out a couple of our favourites below:
8. Little Laundry Helper
As your little one grows they will relish in helping you around the house. Their curiosity is peaked every time they observe you doing even mundane activities, like household chores. So why not get them involved?
While you’re doing laundry, give them an object or two to ‘fold’ and feel. Let them smell it, inspect it and engage with it. When they get bored, give them another.
This is a simple way to get them involved in what you’re doing and keep them engaged, while also encouraging the use of their senses.
This type of activity can also be done in the kitchen, while tidying up their toys or in many different areas of the house.
9. Beach Day
If you’re lucky enough to live near a beach like we do, you can opt for a beach day to stimulate your little one’s senses.
The beach is packed with sensory opportunities! Think sand, sea, sights and more. We like to bring along some simple toys and just let our daughter enjoy exploring her surroundings.
She plays in the sand, we build castles, she splashes in the water, picks up shells and explores just about every inch that she can. Of course, she even tries to eat the sand.
If you don’t live near the beach, plan a similar day at the pool, park or splash pad.
Check out our favourite beach gear by visiting this post! It includes everything we pack in our beach bag when heading to the beach!
Final Thoughts
In hope that you enjoyed reading about some of my family’s favourite sensory activities, that we have engaged in during my daughter’s first year.
Most of these activities involve items that you can find around your home or outside in nature, and require very little time and effort to put together.
The great thing about sensory play is that it’s a simple way for you to be actively involved in play with your little one, which further promotes learning acquisition and development.
Sensory play is vital to stimulate your little ones budding sense of exploration and fuel their growing brain. The more you encourage it in your home, the better off your little one will be.
I Would Love to Hear from You
Do you have favourite sensory activities that you do with your child? I would love to hear about them and I am sure other moms would too! Tell me which of these you look forward to trying out!
Contact me or leave a message in the comments.
