What is sensory exploration?

Why is sensory exploration important?

Sensory exploration encourages discovery and independence through child-led play which helps to teach the children to have their own ideas and be in control of their own learning. Child-led learning can relieve the pressure from children (and parents) to achieve a certain goal and instead build character and important life-skills.

Some key benefits of sensory play can include:

Brain & Language Development
Sensory play can enhance your child’s memory, and ability to complete more complex learning tasks. Language is also developed as the children learn new ways of approaching, and then talking about the world around them.

Fine & Gross Motor Skills
Children can use their sense of touch to explore and identify objects during sensory play, which helps to develop their fine and gross motor skills. These actions can include squeezing, pulling, pushing and throwing.

Problem Solving Skills & Adaptability
Sensory play can involve many different objects, as they play children can identify these objects and figure out how to play with them. This will develop their problem-solving skills and confidence with new things. Children will also learn to improve their adaptability as they play with many different objects in a variety of ways.

Cognitive Growth
As children learn to play with and manipulate new materials, they can also learn new concepts such as ‘sink and float’. The interactive aspect of sensory exploration helps to enhance a child’s thought process, understanding and reasoning.

Social Interaction and Awareness
Once children become comfortable with sensory play, they will feel more inclined to interact with others during the activity and work with them to figure out how to play with the objects. This will help improve their communication with others and their confidence to do so. More active sensory play will help children to become more aware of their bodies, how they work and the space around them.

What activity is best for sensory exploration?
There are an endless number of activities you can set up at home for your children to learn through sensory exploration. If your child is often scared or uncomfortable around messy or dirty things, start with dry ingredients that create less mess and work your way up to more messy activities. There is no ‘best’ way to conduct sensory play. If you are unsure where to start, sensory bottles are an effective way to explore with the senses.