Exploring the Benefits of Sensory Play

From birth to early childhood, children use their five senses to explore and try to make sense of the world around them.

It’s an important part of early childhood development, and providing opportunities for children to actively use their senses as they explore their world through ‘sensory play’ is crucial to brain development.

Learning through sensory exploration comes naturally to babies and young children, which makes sense when you consider that the skills they’ll come to rely on to build an understanding of objects, spaces, people and interactions are yet to be fully developed.

So, what is sensory play?

Picking things up and feeling their texture is what people often associate with sensory play, but it’s about much more than touch. Sensory play includes any activity that stimulates a young child’s senses of touch, smell, taste, sight and hearing, as well as anything which engages movement and balance.

Sensory play is only really limited by your own imagination, with of course some common sense being used around the materials and types of play appropriate for your child’s age and ability.

Some examples to get you started are:

  • Sensory play for babies – watching bubbles float and feeling them land on their skin, or scrunching coloured paper to hear the noise, feel the contours and see the shapes change.
  • Sensory play for toddlers – observing light and shadow created by torch light on objects of different shapes or sizes, or watching the colours mix and the patterns form by finger painting or sponge painting (with child-safe paint).
  • Sensory play for pre-school aged children – creating shapes and playing with kinetic sand, or playing with musical instruments and listening to the tone and pitch as they strike or blow through instruments softly or forcefully.
  • The simplest way to help children engage their senses is by playing outside with nature, full of colours, movement, textures, sounds and smells.

The benefits of sensory play

With sensory play, there’s always much more going on than meets the eye.

Sensory activities, in addition to being fun and interesting for babies and young children, encourage children to explore and investigate. Furthermore, these activities support children to use the ‘scientific method’ of observing, forming a hypothesis, experimenting and making conclusions.

Sensory activities also allow children to refine their thresholds for different sensory information, helping their brain to create stronger connections to sensory information and learn which are useful and which can be filtered out.

For example, a child may find it difficult to play with other children when there is too much going on in their environment with conflicting noises or sights.

Through sensory play, the child can learn to block out the noise which is not important and focus on the play which is occurring with their peer.

The desire to engage with sensory play comes naturally for children and should be encouraged and supported both at home and in early learning environments.

Learn more about Goodstart’s approach to early learning, and find a centre near you.

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Playgroup NSW leads play-based programs and services for NSW families with children birth to school age, offering development, shared experiences, and family support, that results in active citizens and inclusive communities.