Playful Guide: March 2025

Welcome to Greentrike’s March Playful Guide!

Sensory play is an essential aspect of childhood development that engages a child’s senses – sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell – through hands-on activities. As children explore different materials and textures, they learn to communicate and express their feelings, fostering creativity and problem-solving abilities. Today, we’re exploring why we should and how we can enrich playtime with sensory rich experiences!

Sensory exploration and play includes hands-on experiences with a variety of tools and materials that children can use to explore and experiment with a variety of textures, smells, tastes, sounds, and visual stimuli. These rich sensory experiences can also support fine motor and cognitive skills, as well as language development.

Language Development, Vocabulary, and Math

Sensory play is a great way to promote cognitive development, helping to boost recollection, observation, and memory skills; plus, talking with a child during play about the things that they’re sensing can help encourage language development. For example, children may begin to describe things as fuzzy, wet, or cold. Adults can help encourage growth by asking open-ended questions and prompting dialogue about what the child is doing and sensing.

Sensory play can also help children build mathematical skills as they experiment with shapes, using spatial relationship concepts such as above, behind, or bigger than. Since sensory play often involves exploring the world around them with their hands, they can also practice their fine motor skills.

Cooking and food preparation can be a great opportunity for children to engage in sensory play at home. Kneading dough, stirring different kinds of mixtures, and tasting safe-to-eat foods can all help children learn about cause and effect, and develop their vocabulary. Actions such as pouring or using kitchen utensils such as tongs and spoons can also help build fine motor skills. Consider asking children open-ended questions as they help out in the kitchen to encourage deeper thinking! For example,

• What kinds of things taste similar?
• How different is the dough when it’s warm or cold?

While it can get messy, fingerpainting can be a feast for the senses! Mixing colors in different amounts can help children learn about cause and effect, as well as the properties of color, and the wonderfully messy act of painting can allow children to express their emotions through the manipulation of their materials in any way that they see fit. Concentrating on one color at a time provides children with opportunities to focus, increase their knowledge and develop color recognition and vocabulary. We don’t just have green – we have dark green, blue-green, bright green, and so much more!

Sensory bins can be filled with a variety of materials that children can pick up, examine, and touch. In the photos below, children at Greentrike’s Play to Learn session scoop, measure, and bury objects in grains of dried rice; dig through earthy-smelling shredded leaves to uncover pumpkins. Beans, fabrics, pasta, cotton balls, and crinkle paper are all fun options for sensory bins, but it’s always a good idea to be mindful and watchful of any choking hazards.