What is sensory play and why is it so important?
WHAT
The short answer is: Sensory play is any activity that stimulates your child’s senses: touch, smell, taste, movement, balance, sight, and hearing.
Through sensory play children can explore and naturally use scientific processes while they play, investigate, create and discover new sensations.
WHY
Sensory activities, in addition to being fun and interesting, sensory play 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.
Research demonstrates that as children actively use their senses in conjunction with one another, this helps to build pathways between nerves within the brain. When your child is allowed to use multiple senses to accomplish a task, they will learn more from the experience and retain more information.