9 Sensory Activities for Curious Babies and Toddlers (2024)

FAQs

What is sensory play for babies and toddlers? ›

Sensory play is any activity that stimulates our senses – touch, sight, hearing, smell and taste. It helps children interact with and make sense of the world that surrounds them.

Sensory play encourages learning through exploration, curiosity, problem solving and creativity. It helps to build nerve connections in the brain and encourages the development of language and motor skills.

Activities include listening to or playing music, reading books, and playing clapping games. Tactile Sensory Play: Stimulates a child's sense of touch. This can include any activity that explores objects using their hands, such as playing with sand, play dough, or slime.

Some of these activities include reading stories, giving them a curiosity kit, encouraging them to ask questions, helping them categorize, playing word games, encouraging curiosity about nature, introducing kid-friendly science experiments, encouraging curiosity about the world around them, being curious yourself, and ...

There is no definitive answer to this question as each child develops at their own pace and will be ready for sensory play when they are able to engage with their senses in a way that is enjoyable for them.

For young children, sensory play includes any activity that stimulates a child's sense of touch, smell, taste, sight, movement, and hearing. This kind of play helps create connections in the brain that allow for more complex thoughts and tasks.

Games such as peek-a-boo, blowing 'raspberries' and tickling your baby with a soft brush or scarf are also delightful ways to stimulate your baby's senses and have fun together. However, you don't need to put extra time aside to stimulate your baby's senses.

Sensory skills are those such as. vision, hearing, touch, smell, taste, vestibular (for balance and head position in space), and. proprioception (information from the muscles and joints). They are responsible for receiving. information.

Messy play builds foundational skills that are crucial for children's later development. It is one of the most important kinds of early learning experiences we can offer to infants and toddlers.

How does sensory play help social skills? ›

By engaging in sensory play with siblings or peers, your child begins developing social skills. They'll learn how to communicate, how to troubleshoot problems and learn to adapt to how others play.

Typically, we'd think of sensory play as any kind of play-based activity that engages at least one of the five senses – touch, taste, sight, sound and smell.

Sensory Calming Activities provide sensory input and help to meet your child's sensory processing needs. They can help your child to become calm, self regulated and less fidgety. These sensory calming activities can also reduce your child's stress and anxiety.

Sensory play is a type of play that activates and stimulates a child's senses. Often, sensory play focuses on stimulating touch, sight, and hearing as those senses are most accessible.

When infants and toddlers explore, you'll hear some different sounds that they make. Some babies make higher pitch sound when they're really excited about something curious about something and want to attract that attention from you. And sometimes you may see raised eyebrows or a focus gaze.

Sing songs with motions like “Itsy, Bitsy Spider,” “Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes,” and “Wheels on the Bus.” Help move your baby's arms to make the motions while you are singing. Encourage your baby to explore their hands or feet by tickling them or clapping them together. Play around with tracking objects.

Indoor Curiosity Approach settings are filled with authentic, open-ended resources. Think old clocks, metal tea sets, dried fruit in bottles, unique jewellery boxes, serving trays, kitchen utensils, and shells, stones, and dried fruit in glass jars – objects that children can explore and investigate.

Curiosity is the urge you feel to know more about something. If you find a diary in a coffee shop, curiosity will make you want to look inside — but respect for the writer's privacy may convince you not to. Curiosity is the state of being curious: inquisitive, wondering, ready to poke around and figure something out.