Blog
Sensory Play
‘Sensory
play includes any activity that stimulates a young child’s senses: touch,
smell, taste, sight and hearing. Sensory activities facilitate explorations and
naturally encourage children to use scientific processes while they play,
create, investigate and explore. Spending time stimulating their senses helps
children to develop cognitively, linguistically, socially and emotionally,
physically and creatively.’
Our project is to investigate and then set up and
document one area of continuous provision, showing how children’s learning
would be planned for, implemented and recorded within it. The provision we have
chosen to investigate is sensory play. We have been able to research the
benefits of sensory play and learn how to implement this within our settings.
We have shown how we could implement it in the Early Years Foundation Stage
(EYFS) curriculum. We explained how sensory play met the prime areas such as
communication and language, physical development and personal, social and
emotional development. We then explained the specific areas, which are
literacy, mathematics, understand the world and expressive arts and design. We
looked at how sensory play will support the development of children and how it
can further their learning.
The adult role within a sensory activity is to
initiate activities as well as join in with the activities, make observations
throughout the activity and ensure the area and resources are safe for
children. If we were to set up a sensory corner within a setting, we would lay
out the area as a colourful and topic related area, with pictures and wall
displays. It would have different provisions of sensory toys where the children
could access the resources freely and easily.
Our presentation was presented as a PowerPoint. Throughout
the presentation we reflected critically on the ways in which children learn
through play-based approaches. We also demonstrated how to plan and implement
opportunities for holistic development in sensory play based on our analysis of
children’s interests and needs. This therefore explained the main principles
and processes of documenting children’s play and learning. We researched the
information that we presented to ensure that our information was reliable. In
addition we made our presentation interactive by producing the sensory boxes
that we had been explaining and talking about throughout the presentation. We
connected our provision to the theorist Jean Piaget. The reason we associated
our provision to Piaget was because of his four stages of cognitive
development. Piaget believed children are pre-adapted to learning and have a
natural curiosity, they are active participants in the learning process with
therefore helps there cognitive structures develop overtime.
In our presentation
we created an activity using sensory boxes (see pictures). The idea of the
sensory boxes were to encourage people to use their senses to guess what was in
the box and then correlate it to the appropriate season. They were not allowed
to look into the boxes as the idea was for it to be a guessing game. The
resources in the boxes were varied from being natural such as leaves and sand,
to toys such as a chick and candy canes. We played a short clip that was found
off of YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DikVSs_3SI)
to demonstrate how our activity would work and benefit if a child was playing
the game.
Cassandra Carere
Becky Evans
Hayley Johnson
