Sensory Play

What is Sensory Play?

Sensory play for children is anything hands-on that stimulate's all or most of their sense's, being those you would be familiar with - Sight, Smell, Touch, Sound and Taste - as well as body awareness and balance.

What are the Benefits of Sensory Play?

Sensory Play assist's your pre-schooler or early learner with brain development - strengthening the nerve connections to the brain leading to stronger memory skills and assists your child in the future as they tackle complicated learning activities and build problem solving skills.

The acts of observing, trying new experiences and manipulating different products, textures and colours together, will assist your childs cognitive learning. Children will also start to recognise similarities and differences in products, such as texture, stickiness, smell, and rough/smooth surfaces.

Sensory activities will help your child develop adaptation skills - as situations change in play, children learn to adjust their play and goals to accomodate the new changes - such experiences will assist your child in building confidence in ability and seek new challanges.

Sensory Play of a tactile nature can be very calming for children - the feeling of cool dough or water rushing between their fingers, or the sensation of gliding their hands through water marbles can all assist in restoring a child's emotions. Children who are worried or stressed can benefit greatly from tactile sensory play.

As children experience different sensory play activities, their language skills and vocabulary increases as they engage in conversation with their peers and adults in attempting to explain their sensory experiences and how different activities smell, taste and feel.

As children feel, pinch, scrunch and turn different sensory elements, they are fine tuning their motor skills and exercising the small muscles in their hands and fingers, this is vitally important for pre-schooler's as motor skill's are of upmost importance when learning to hold a pencil and write their name.

Open-ended sensory play - any type of play that doesnt have a pre-determined ending will foster creativity, creative thinking and story telling in your child as they use their sensory experiences to develope their own games, stories, sceneries - and let their imaginations take over.

When enjoyed with peers, sensory play will assist your child in developing co-operation skills, sharing, and teamwork skills to achieve a joint outcome!

The benefits of sensory play and endless and ongoing - learning through play is a fundamental part of pre-school learning and we hope you find fun and creativity in our collection of sensory activities