Maybe your child has tried out a sensory bin or a water table at a children’s museum, daycare, or a class, or maybe you’ve stumbled across sensory play ideas on Pinterest or Instagram or a Flisat table group on Facebook, and you want to try it out, but aren’t sure how to get started? Here’s a beginner’s guide.
Sensory play has a few basic components:
- a bin – don’t feel like you have to start by buying a fancy table – it’s OK to start with water play in the sink or use a cake pan or a plastic storage tub
- things to scoop and pour with – spoons and measuring cups work great, and tongs to pick up larger items
- smaller containers to put in the bin – plastic cups and “tupperware” containers are good
- a sensory material – I would start with something that’s really easy to pick up: balls made of crumpled paper, pompoms or cotton balls, pasta (bowtie or rotini work well); rice is always a good option, but expect that it will get spilled across the floor!
That’s all you really need to start with. Don’t feel like you have to create amazing Instagram-worthy wonders. Start simple! (For this post, I purposely picked photos of some really basic set-ups so you see how easy it is – like this one with pompoms, metal treasure box and some plastic animals.)
The first several times your child plays with it, sit alongside them, teaching them how to do sensory play – eventually this will be great independent play, but first they need you to teach them.
What do you do? It’s super simple – you scoop, you pour. You fill the container. You dump it out. You pick up a handful of rice and let it sift through your fingers. You stir. It’s OK if your child repeats the same actions hundreds of times. Sensory play is all about repetition. It can be a very soothing play activity while they’re also learning a lot about how to use their body and how to use tools to move things around. (Keys to brain development are: novelty, repetition, and down-time and sensory bins can bring all this.)
If you feel like you’re ready to liven it up a bit, the easiest way to add novelty is to take some of your children’s toys they already love and add them in so they can explore them in this new setting. (Filling a toy dump truck with rice, pouring rice over plastic animals, or hiding and finding puzzle pieces to assemble a puzzle with.)
Let them play as long as they want, and move on when they’re ready. They’ll come back to it again later. If they spilled materials on the floor, ask them to help with clean-up, even if they only clean up a few items, it’s a good practice to begin.
That’s it. That’s the basics.
Learn More
I’ve got lots more ideas on this blog which focuses on parenting skills, and my other blog Inventors of Tomorrow, which focuses on STEM learning.
- This post is called Reducing Sensory Bin Mess, but it also talks a lot about how to teach your child appropriate ways to play with the bin.
- Check out the Ultimate Guide to Sensory Bins to get LOTS more ideas about what sensory bins you could buy, what materials to fill them with (everything from flax seed to cloud dough), what tools to use (from water wheels to conveyor belts), and what add-ins to include (jingle bells? magnetic letters? seashells?). This post also talks about the benefits of sensory play for brain development.
- Check out the Ultimate Guide to Water Tables to learn all about great options for enhancing water play. (Many of these ideas also work at bath time or in the swimming pool!)
- Sensory Table Set-Ups shares lots of examples I found online and my observations about general lessons to learn from these ideas.
- Looking for other simple, low cost ideas for what to do with a 1 – 4 year old child? Check out my Cheap Dates with Toddlers series.