What is sensory play?
Sensory play is an activity that stimulates a young child’s senses of touch, smell, taste, sight and hearing, exploration, curiosity, problem solving, and creativity. It helps to encourages the development of language and motor skills, as well as anything which engages movement, balance, and actions such as shaping, scooping, molding, taking turns, teamwork, cooperation, and communication These skills require multiple muscles to work together which helps a child’s fine motor skills and develop cognitive skills.
Sensory bins can support cognitive development as children sort hidden items by size or color. Putting number and letter shapes into the sensory bin can provide children the opportunity to learn the alphabet, their numbers and gain practice with counting and spelling. Music education represents a part of sensory education.
Fine Motor Skills
Sensory play demands fine motor skills as children have to use their hands to interact with objects. They’ll play with whatever is on the table. They will handle balls, pour sand, mold clay, and grasp spoons. Playing with many different objects is enticing to children and helps them have fun.
Cognitive Skills
Cognitive means to think and to reason. Children get to interact with the items on the table in ways that get them to count, organize, match, and label objects.
Language Skills
Sensory play presents the perfect opportunity to help children develop language skills. They learn vocabulary by attaching words to objects.
Social and Emotional Skills
They play together and engage with each other in a positive way. They express their feelings and thoughts and engage their sense of sight, smell, sound, and touch and in some cases, even taste.
Relaxation
The objects on the tables tend to capture children’s attention and engage their minds. This engages and calms them. In fact, they often forget that they’re having fun learning.
Creativity
Children are given the freedom to do whatever they want with the objects on the table. The focus is on how children use the materials on the table rather than what’s created with the objects. This makes the learning process fun.