Beecome Through Play - Sensory Activities

Sensory Activity Ideas

Sensory development is really important and everything humans do, involve one or more senses. By using your senses (see, touch, smell, hear), babies discover the world. Humans experience these sensations through interactions with the environment. Interpreting the meaning of these sensations for actions is called sensory processing. When a child uses his/her senses to discover a new object, he/she creates a neural pathway in the brain. The more often he/she stimulates the senses from his/her environment, the more likely the child is to create new neural pathways and strengthen old neural pathways in the brain. Sensory processing can even help to deal with trauma!

Try out these activities to improve sensory development:

Sensory rice: Fill a Ziploc bag with 1 cup of rice and 1 teaspoon of vinegar. Scoop or pour about ⅛ teaspoon food colouring into the bag. Zip the bag shut. Squeeze the bag and mix the rice all around until the food colouring is well distributed. Add more food colouring to reach the desired colour. Spread out the rice in a square bowl and let your child play with it. You can hide things inside the rice, let your child pick up a rice kernel with a tweezer or tips of his/her fingers.

Slime: This recipe uses Borax so make sure your child doesn’t eat it. Add 1 cup Bostik or Ponal white glue, 1 cup of water and food colouring to a bowl and mix well. Dissolve 1 teaspoon Borax in ¼ cup of warm water. Mix the glue and borax together and see what happens. Get your hands in there and mix some more. If it is very watery, throw some of the water off. It also gets better when left in the fridge for a while.
Let your child swing outside on the jungle gym
Jump on a trampoline
Fidget toys (fidget spinners, poppers, fidget cubes, etc)
Threading: Thread some beads onto a piece of string.
Make a sensory jar: Take a clear bottle. Fill the bottle ¾ full with warm water. Add glitter / jelly beads / any other small objects. Squeeze a few drops of food colouring into the water. Use superglue and glue the lid shut. The child then uses it like a snow globe, watching how the objects move around inside the bottle. This is a great “Calm down” activity when your child needs some time to cool down after a big emotion.

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