Where Play Meets Potential
What’s the Deal with Sensory Play?
You may have browsed Pinterest to find countless pins on sensory bins, sensory bags, sensory activities, and other sensory play ideas and wondered, “What’s the deal with sensory play?” The thing is sensory play is so important in the young formative years of a child’s life. In my opinion, sensory play is becoming even more important in the technology age in which we currently live. When so often children are in front of a screen experiencing the world in a 2D environment, they need the real world to understand so much more about how something smells, tastes, feels, along with cause and effect.
Sensory Play and Brain Development
Sensory play is crucial for brain development. Every wonder why babies put EVERYTHING in their mouths? It has been shown with the way the brain develops that there are more neural receptors in the mouth per square millimeter than there are in any other body part of a very young child. Also, babies do not have proper fine motor control in their hands to fully experience an object, so they put it in their mouth to use their lips and tongue to feel the texture and get a taste of the object. They are learning through their senses. Typically, by about 3 years of age children stop putting things in their mouth.
Learning with Sensory Play
Babies learn by exploring the properties of the things around them.
Sensory play continues to be important past infancy because young children are still learning through their senses. Even as adults we learn better when we can experience something or do things for ourselves than when we are lectured at or simply read something in a book or online. Basically, when children are allowed to explore their surroundings with all of their senses they can make more sense of their world and more synapses are created and connected in their brain. For example, if you have never felt anything wet before and someone said, “Touch this it’s wet” you may not make a connection in your brain and you wouldn’t know how to approach that scenario. If you have many experiences with things that are wet you may begin to connect the dots in your brain.
Here are some cool things about sensory play:
- You can learn through the senses of touch, smell, taste, hearing, and seeing.
- Some say there are several other more complex senses, such as body awareness, also known as proprioception.
- Nerve connections in the brain are made through sensory play.
- Sensory play does not have to be messy.
- Sensory play is not only about touch (try out smell jars or Montessori sound cylinders).
- Sensory play can be calming.
- Multiple developmental domains (language, fine motor, gross motor, cognitive) can be integrated along with sensory experiences.
- You can learn more and retain more of that information if learned through a sensory activity.
- Sensory play can be done on a budget.
What are your thoughts on sensory play? Leave a comment below.
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