Sensory Play Activities for Early Childhood

How do you learn? Many adults learn through reading. Some prefer to learn by listening to audio tapes, or watching video tapes. Some learn by doing, by taking classes from a master and imitating him. All are great methods of learning! And to some extent, your young child will lean towards one or the other eventually. But from infancy through the preschool years, young children learn most through their five senses.

How Children Learn

Have you ever seen someone give a rattle to a baby? What does he do with it? First, he sees it, using his sense of sight. Then he reaches for it, takes it in his hands, using his sense of touch. He shakes it, using his sense of hearing. He mouths it, using his sense of taste. And finally, he sniffs it, using his sense of smell (although few rattles have a scent). Then he throws it away. He’s done. He’s learned all that he can learn from it. And usually, the adult picks it back up and gives it to the baby again, who throws it again. That is a fun game! He will probably never play with that rattle again, other than to throw it. This is sensory play.

To some extent, one could argue that all play is sensory play. When children play with blocks, they are touching them, and they hear them if they knock over the block tower. When children paint, they may comment on how the paint smells, or how it looks when they swirl the colors together. But to narrow sensory play down a bit, sensory play is play that engages the child to explore one or more of his senses, that is not grouped into another category of play.

Earlier, I posted an article on the Seven Areas of Creative Play:

1. Dramatic Play
2. Block Play
3. Outdoor Play (also called Large Muscle play)
4. Art
5. Music
6. Books
7. Table Toys (also called Small Muscle Play, or manipulatives)

Now, I’d like to add the eighth category – Sensory Play.

Sensory play is often referred to as “messy play”.

Children can usually make a mess no matter what they are playing! But some sensory activities are inherently messy. Still, this area is critical to your child’s growth and development. You will need a bin, table, or area designated for sensory play. Day care centers usually have a sand play table, or a sand & water play table, which can double as the sensory table. At home, parents may wish to buy an inexpensive child’s splash pool – the smallest one available, 3 feet in diameter is fine. Put it on the living room carpet on top of an old shower curtain, to facilitate with clean-up. In warm weather, you can move the splash pool/sensory table out to the yard or patio.

Here is a partial list of activities for the splash pool/sensory play table. Once you get started, your own imagination will help you come up with dozens more. I hope you’ll share them with us here in the comments section beneath this post. Remember, for your child to get the most benefit from this play, you need to play with him. You need to speak with him, engage him in conversation. Ask him thoughtful questions. “How does this FEEL? How does this SMELL? Can you tell me how it SOUNDS? This is safe to taste, you may taste this. How does it TASTE? What does it look like?”

1. Sand. You can have a little sandbox inside. Sand is such a wonderful toy – it is ancient and universal. It feels cool in the morning shade, and warm in the afternoon sun. It packs better when it is damp. It washes away (erodes) in the rain. It doesn’t usually have a smell, but sometimes sand at the beach smells fishy. It feels rough. It’s fun to roll in! (outside!). When you have a little sandbox inside, the child plays differently than in the backyard sandbox. Outside he can sit in it, and push big trucks, and dig big holes. Inside, it is more fun to pour sand from a pitcher, or push little matchbox-sized construction trucks through it.
2. Water. If you run a preschool or daycare, you will want to have water play available. If you are teaching your little one at home, then he will get enough water play in the bathtub. For more information on the importance of water play, click here.

Girl Playing in Rice
3. Rice. Rice can be an interesting change from sand. It won’t make a sand castle, but it does pour nicely through a toy pitcher. It will make the wheels spin on a water wheel toy. It is fun to smoosh your hands in, scoop it, dump it, rearrange it… and it vacuums up better than sand. Pour about 30 pounds of clean, dry white rice into your splash pool. Add some measuring cups and spoons, toy dishes, small cars, etc. Your child will enjoy this for an entire week, I’m sure! By then you’ll be sick of vacuuming up the rice. Put it away, but save it to bring it back out on a rainy day when you really need to keep your child amused. You can add more to this by coloring the rice. Read how to do that here.
4. Fall leaves. In the fall, bring in a bag full of autumn leaves. Add whatever is available in your area. Add small sticks, acorns, nuts, pinecones, small branches of pine boughs, etc. Your child may just touch things, smell them, lick them (ick!), etc. Or he may want to bring his toy cars to the table, and build forts for toy plastic animals. Let him explore the textures of these natural items. When you are about to empty this sensory activity, press the leaves for a future art project.
5. Winter snow. Bring in a bucket full of snow. Let your child touch it and taste it. Smell it. Look at it closely. Use a magnifying glass. Put some in a glass and watch it melt. Dump small plastic penguins or whales in the snow, and let child play. Give him a pair of mittens and let him build a small snow fort for toy people. Talk about cold, hot, soft, hard, and other descriptive words.
6. Spring Flowers. Bring in a bucket of potting soil. Let child play in that. Add a bit of water, let him play in the mud. Let him play with small garden tools, or with his construction trucks again. When the mud play is over, then plant some bean seeds in the sensory table. Soak the beans overnight in water before you plant them – to speed up germination. Beans grow fast, and are easy to see. You and your child can pull up a bean plant every couple of days to examine the changes (plant plenty of seeds!). At first, the bean shell swells and splits. Then you can see a tiny bean plant folded up inside the seed! Then you’ll see the root shoot out, and then a stem with leaves. It never gets old. If you’re tired of the muddy splash pool, you can move the surviving bean seeds to paper cups or pots. Wash out the splash pool in the yard with a hose, for the next activity.
7. Bubbles. Best done outside! Mix warm water, dish detergent, and a bit of glycerin into your splash pool. Put your child in a swim suit, and set him outside with various bubble-blowing wands or toys. Supervise! Children can drown in an inch of water. Bubbles are great for sensory play. If you use scented dish soap, your bubble stuff will smell nice. Bubbles can have all the colors of the rainbow in them. They feel slippery. They taste soapy. Can you catch one without popping it?
8. Ooblech. This is very, very messy! But great fun for kids of all ages. You might want to mix this in a smaller area than the splash pool/sensory table. You could sit your child at a picnic table OUTSIDE, and give him a cookie sheet or cake pan half-full of oobleck. For more fun, read Dr. Seuss’s classic tale of Bartholomew and the Oobleck first. Oobleck is made with cornstarch and water. For more specific directions, click here.
9. Ice. While you really have to wait for winter to do the snow activity, thanks to freezers, you can do ice any time. It might be more fun to do it on the hot days in summer. Dump clumps of ice in the sensory table. Let child touch them, lick them, sniff them, and explore them. Then, child could drop droplets of colored water on the ice to create patterns or mix colors. Child could also shake salt on the ice to see what happens. (The ice starts to melt). You can extend this activity by placing tiny plastic toys in an ice cube tray, filling it with water and freezing them. The child can play explorer, or paleontologist, by extracting the toys from the ice with a toy mallet.
10. Packing Peanuts. Also, very messy! But right after Christmas you may have an excess of these terribly non-earth friendly styrofoam pieces laying around. Dump them all in the splash pool/sensory table, and let your child’s imagination run wild. He can pretend it is snow. Dress up in mittens and a hat and scarf, and sit in the “snow” to look at picture books, like Alvin Tresselt’s classic, “The Mitten”.
11. Put left-over wrapping paper in the sensory table. Children can rip it, cut it, make collages out of it. They can pretend to wrap up their toys in it. They will have almost as much fun with the left-over wrappings as they have with their Christmas toys.
12. Coffee grounds. Save your coffee grounds for several weeks. Set them out daily to dry, then put them in a bag to save them. When you have enough, put them in the sensory table. Coffee grounds have a different texture and a pleasant smell. Children will play in it like sand.
13. Seashells. You’re lucky if you live by the sea and can get a good supply of these for free. Otherwise, craft stores now stock them. Try to get a variety of shapes, sizes, and colors. You can scatter just seashells, or put sand in the bottom of the table and scatter the shells on top of the sand.
14. Oatmeal. Plain, raw, uncooked, oatmeal. Can be poured, scooped, measured, or moved around with toy trucks. Shakes off clothing well, and vacuums up almost as well as rice. One mom I met kept a huge oatmeal “sandbox” in her spare bedroom for her two young sons.

Legos Stimulate Creativity, While Helping to Develop Small Motor Control
15. Legos. You need to be the judge if your child is ready for small LEGOS yet. Younger children can use DUPLOS. Sometime between the age of three and four, many children are ready to play with the smaller legos. If you dump an assortment in the sensory table, they can build and build, and not have to pick up! An alternative, is to let your child play with legos on a sheet. Then when it is time to clean up, you lift up the four corners of the sheet, and put everything into a box together. Little legos are so much fun, but very boring to pick up. You could actually make a lego mat, by cutting the sheet into a circle, sewing 1″ rings around the edge, and threading a cord through the rings. Then just pull the drawstring together at clean-up time.
16. Shredded paper. This is very interesting to play in, but also very messy. Little paper shreds stick with static electricity to your hair, clothes, and carpet. You’ll want to vacuum up your child when he’s through! I hid mini candy canes in shredded paper for a Christmas time activity at my preschool.
17. Dried corn. This is great for indoor play, especially for younger toddlers. It sweeps up better than it vacuums. You can get huge sacks of dried corn at feed stores for about $5.00. Some pet supply stores in the cities will also stock dried corn. After your child has scooped it, measured it, poured it, patted it, sniffed it, tasted it (ick), and you no longer want it in your house, then you can take it to a park to feed it to the ducks. Corn is a bit more nutritious for them than chunks of stale white bread.
18. Easter grass. This is a good seasonal activity. Let your child play with the Easter grass. He can bury plastic Easter eggs in it, or small toys. Let him glue it to construction paper at art time. It comes in many colors and textures. Some are very shiny and pretty. Some now are edible.
19. Nuts. Put an assortment of nuts in their shells in the sensory table. (Watch out for signs of a nut allergy in your child! One in one-hundred children are allergic to nuts. Some nut allergies are life-threatening.) Talk about the textures of the different nuts. How do they smell? Some are smooth, some are rough. Some are small, some are quite large. Get a nut cracker, and sit with your child as you crack open some nuts and taste them. Put the cracked nut shells back in the sensory table. Play with them until you are bored with them, or until you’ve eaten them all! Then glue some nut shells on cardboard in a mosaic, and clean up the sensory table for the next activity.
20. Pudding. Mix up a package of instant pudding, and let your child “fingerpaint” with it. You might want to put this in a smaller container, rather than the splash pool, unless you run a day care and plan to mix up several boxes. This is one sensory activity where you can encourage tasting! Have children wash their hands before playing there.
21. Coins. Supervise! A child can swallow a penny, and get copper poisoning. Dump your change jar into a bowl with rubbing alcohol to clean them somewhat. Money can carry many germs. Then, dump the clean, dry coins into the sensory table. Talk about colors, shapes, sizes, textures, etc. Let children sort the coins. Put the silver ones here, the copper ones here…
22. Magnets and paper clips. Dump several large boxes of plain paper clips into the sensory table. Add some large magnets. Let children explore, discover how magnets will push against each other, or pull together. How many paper clips can each magnet lift? Try adding other metal items to the sensory table. Will the magnets lift pop cans? Toy cars? Pennies?
23. Play dough. You can make quantities of home-made playdough. Add different scents to it – put vanilla in one batch and color it brown. Substitute Banana flavoring for the vanilla in the next batch, and color it yellow. Put peppermint flavoring in a third batch and color it red or green. Put almond flavoring in a batch, and chose a color to color it . You can put grape Kool-aid powder in another batch, skipping the vanilla (use plain kool-aid, not the kind with sugar in it.). Put all the colors of playdough out at once, and all the playdough toys. Let your child smell them, taste them, mush them around and mix them together. Cover the playdough up in air-tight containers when not in use. Add cookie cutters, rolling pins, and other playdough toys as needed.
    
24. Dry instant mashed potatoes. Start with the dry mashed potato flakes. Have your child experience that. Then slowly add some warm water and moosh that around. Add more warm water, and moosh. Can add warm, colored water – green on St. Patrick’s Day, orange for Halloween, etc. Add enough warm water until all the flakes are moistened, and potatoes are thick and warm and mushy. Continue to play, taste, mush, mix, and explore. Can hide clean, small toys in the mush. Can play with ice cream scoops and toy doll dishes. When done, dump the mush in the garbage and hose off the pool outside.

These are just a few of the hundreds of ideas you can use in your sensory play area. Next, you can try combining them. Add glitter to your sand table. Hide coins in the dry corn. Float ice in your water table.

Anything you see that might have an interesting smell, texture, taste, sound, or is visually stimulating, can have potential for the sensory table, if you deem it to be safe for children.

Have fun! Your child will.

Some materials for Sensory Play:

Related Reading:
Sensory Play
Sight lesson plans
Sound lesson plans
Taste lesson plans
Touch lesson plans

Photo Credits:
Baby with Rattle: by Ian Watson
Girl Playing in Rice: by Grandma Musher
Boy with Legos: by Mads Boedker

Tags: activities for kids, Early Childhood Education, Preschool, sandbox, sensory play, water table