Sensory Play: Exploring with our Fingers
Sensory play is always a hit with our little ones as they just love getting their hands dirty!
With a bit of unpredictable weather on our hands, we decided to set up a sensory experience indoors – to keep our hands busy and minds engaged. Play dough is an all time favorite and one of our little ones suggested we make some yellow play dough. Sure thing!
Getting all the ingredients and utensils from the kitchen, we set up the table ready for mixing. Play dough is a simple recipe and once you have made it a few times you probably wouldn’t need to refer back to it. But we always want to give our little ones opportunities to be involved and lead their own learning, so we brought out the recipe card as well!
Since there were many children who wanted to use the play dough, we decided to triple the recipe to ensure there was enough for all. Many of our older tamariki enjoy adding numbers and so we used this as an opportunity to practice this and apply it to a real situation.
“If we normally need 1 cup of flour then how many cups would we need if we made the recipe 3 times?”, we asked. Using our fingers, we counted together and added 3 cups of flour to the bowl. Following the rest of the recipe we began adding all the dry ingredients into the bowl before adding the final wet ingredients. We noticed that we had less cream of tartar and salt than a triple recipe required but were curious to find out how this would affect the consistency.
Using our strong muscles and taking turns, our little ones passed the bowl and spoon around watching closely as they mixed all the ingredients together and saw the yellow coming through.
Our playdough didn’t look the same as usual and when we emptied the bowl, straight away we could see its consistency was different. Our little hands couldn’t wait any longer and soon enough, everyone had a bit of this mysterious substance in front of them. Some children immediately noted that it was “sticky and drippy” whilst another described it as “slimy”. Perhaps it was similar to slime?
Regardless of its label, our little ones began pushing, pressing and pulling this substance between their fingers and onto the table – to gain a better understanding of it as well as work their finger muscles. One of our little ones suggested we added more flour and so we sprinkled some flour upon each heap and let our fingers mix this in – but it was like the flour just disappeared!
Our little ones spent quite some time stretching, pulling and squishing this substance and used their imaginations to create different things. This type of sensory play is great for children’s development as it helps their brain create stronger connections about the world around them as well as supports language development.
It also helps develop their fine motor skills as they use their fingers to explore. Children’s scientific thinking comes alive when faced with unknown sensory experiences which provide them with opportunities to think and use “trial and error” to make sense of what they are exploring.
Watch this space to see what other sensory adventures our little ones go on next!