Stimulating The Senses With Sensory Play
Everything is about sensory at this age. It’s how children make sense of the world around them.
Sensory activities allow children to explore and refine their thresholds for different sensory information, helping their brain to create stronger connections to process and respond to sensory information. A variety of activities encourages children to use scientific processes while they play, create, investigate, and explore.
Our current focus is extending on sensory exploration, providing opportunities to stimulate the children’s 7 senses. Yep! you read that correctly…… 7 senses!
What Does This Lead To?
This leads to a child’s ability to complete more complex learning tasks and supports brain development cognitive growth, language development, awareness, gross motor skills, social interaction, problem-solving skills, social and emotional development, creativity, comfort and adaptability.
- Brain Development– Sensory play has been proven by research to strengthen the nerve connections in the pathways of the brain.
- Cognition – The acts of observing, trying new experiences, and manipulating new materials all work together to expand the thought processes of children.
- Awareness – Taking part in sensory activities helps kids become more aware of the spaces that physically surround them (and their position in space) and more mindful of themselves as individuals, separate from their parents, siblings, and playmates.
- Adaptability – During sensory play, kids regularly find themselves in interesting, new situations to which they must adapt successfully.
- Comfort – The emotional benefits of sensory play are sometimes overlooked
- Language Development – While they take part in sensory play together, children have countless opportunities to practise communicating verbally.
- Motor Skills – Children touch and move things as a form of texture and shape exploration. While pinching, turning, and pouring, they exercise and fine-tune the small muscles, mainly in their fingers and hands.
- Creativity– An open-ended project where the process is more important than the product is important when offering exciting sensory materials to children.
- Problem Solving – When children interact with a wide assortment of materials and open-ended activities, they have many opportunities to make predictions, solve problems, make decisions, and compare the results against their original predictions.
- Social and Emotional Development – Kids often work in small groups or side-by-side during sensory play, which helps them learn to communicate, share, and get along together.
What Are The 5 Senses?
Sight, Sound, Smell, Taste, and Touch: this is in order of how the Human Body Receives Sensory Information.
- Which of these senses is the strongest? Vision is often thought of as the strongest of the senses. That’s because humans tend to rely more on sight, rather than hearing or smell, for information about their environment.
- Which sense has the best memory? The sense of smell is closely linked with memory, probably more so than any of our other senses.
- Where is the sensory part of the brain? It’s in the The parietal lobe. It figures out the messages you receive from the five senses of sight, touch, smell, hearing and taste. This part of the brain tells you what is part of the body and what is part of the outside world.
- Sight (Vision) – the stimulation of light receptors in our eyes, which our brains then interpret into visual images.
- Hearing (Auditory) – the reception of sound, via mechanics in our inner ear.
- Smell (olfactory) – the stimulation of chemical receptors in the upper airways (nose).
- Taste – (Gustatory) the stimulation that comes when our taste receptors react to chemicals in our mouth.
- Touch – (Tactile) the stimulation that comes from touch receptors in our skin that react to pressure, heat/cold, or vibration.
Two More Senses That We Overlook
We often talk about the 5 senses, but there are actually 7.
- Vestibular and
- Proprioception.
Vestibular the perception of our body in relation to gravity, movement and balance. The vestibular system measures acceleration, g-force, body movements and head position. We use our vestibular system when we are in an elevator, knowing whether we are lying down or sitting up and being able to walk along a balance beam.
Proprioception is very important, as it lets us know exactly where our body parts are, how we are positioned in space and to plan our movements. We use our proprioception sense when we clap our hands together with our eyes closed, write with a pencil with correct pressure, and navigate through a narrow space.
What It Looks Like In Our Classroom?
- Lavender Playdough – making playdough from scratch, is not only safe to eat but it allows us to choose the scent we want. Stimulates olfactory, as well as sight and touch.
- Sensory Bottles – Once you finish with your plastic VOSS water bottles, recycle into a sensory bottle. We made a variety with rocks, shells and animals in them, so if you shake the bottle you can hear and see the rocks and shells fall. Stimulates touch, sight & auditory.
- Sensory Table– we chose to splash paint directly onto the table to provide the children with a kinesetic experience with their hands, which they could open their eyes to stimulate their vision or close their eyes to heighten the sense of touch.
- Sensory with Apples- a perfect choice for afternoon tea. We cut the red and green apples in half, for the children to feel them and smell them before they tasted them. Touch, sight, taste.
Activities to engage vestibular & proprioception senses
- Sensory Trolley– An assortment of grains, seeds, pasta, rice and oats for a kinesetic experience of touch, mix, sort and plan our movements with collecting materials with tongs.
- Yoga, brain gym & dance – To engage vestibular & proprioception senses
- Sing and move to action songs– One of our daily favourites teaches us about our body parts (heads, shoulder, knees and toes) which engages our Proprioception senses.
- Fine Motor activities – Writing with a pencil or colouring in using the correct pressure, stimulates the vestibular senses.
- Gross motor activities- Skipping, jumping, digging in the sandpit, obstacles courses are all stimulating the Proprioception & vestibular senses.
Tips For Home Play
Parents can set up a permanent sensory table at home using sand or water, just change the props every day to make it interesting for the children. Click on the link below for more ideas for home play sensory. https://www.pinterest.com.au/stevespangler/sensory-bins-bottles-and-tables/
That’s all this month from Miss Hannelie, Miss Sky and the Snakes (Jomgwong) children
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