Inexpensive, early childhood, multi sensory activities. Activities for toddlers to see, feel, touch, hear, and taste items in their envoronment and then discuss the experience.
Activities for toddlers that are considered sensory include those which allow the child to utilize one or all of the five senses of sight, hearing, smelling, tasting and touching. Activities that involve more than one sense are called muti-sensory activities.
One multi-sensory activity for toddlers involves making pudding and taping white paper on a table and allowing the toddlers to place their hand in the pudding and use the pudding as they would if it were paint and their fingers as though they were to paintbrushes to create drawings and etc. This activity allows children to utilize the senses of sight and touch and to add a sensory activity for taste, the adult in charge of the activity could save some of the pudding for eating after the children finish the activity.
A sensory activity for the sense of touch is to provide the toddlers with a variety of materials of different textures. Examples of materials include cotton balls, pieces of scrap fabric made of velvet, corduroy or silk, burlap, a piece of aluminum foil, sand paper, dried leaves and any other appropriate textures that are very soft or very rough. The adult should arrange the variety of textures on a surface so that the children can feel the various textured items. The adult should lay the materials out in a fashion that mixes the textures up and the toddlers can eventually sort and place the soft textures in a pile and the rough textures in a separate pile. Toddlers can also be ask to name the variety of materials or to point to the texture the adult asks him/her to identify. This activity can be followed up by taking an outdoor walk to use the toddler's sense of sight to guess which category of texture (rough or soft) that things seen in nature (flowers, dirt, leaves, grass, trees etc.) would be in and when it is safe, the toddlers can even touch the object to determine if it is more rough or soft in texture.
A fun activity to encourage toddlers to use their sense of smell is to use plastic containers that 35 millimeter film is sold in and punch a hole in the lid, just large enough to release a scent. Fill each container with contents which will give off a familiar scent. Actual objects can be placed in the container or a cotton ball can be dipped in a particular liquid to represent a scent and placed in the container. Actual objects that can be placed in the containers can include: very small pieces of onions, a very small amount of peanut butter, a very small piece of a lemon, banana, orange or peppermint. The other containers could have cotton balls which have been soaked in perfume, cinnamon, coffee grounds, rubbing alcohol or vinegar. Other common scents can be used at the discretion of the adult providing the activity as long as the scent does not pose a safety risk to the toddlers. The toddlers can sit in a circle and be given one container a piece. They should be ask to identify the scent and perhaps even tell what the object from which the scent is or is used for (food, cooking spice etc.). The toddlers can then pass the scents around the circle and allow their peers to smell the same objects and see if they agree as to what the scented object is or represents. The adult should make sure all of the toddlers are exposed to all of the scents. This activity may be repeated on different days to assure all of the toddlers have experienced all of the scents and to reinforce association of correct object to correct scent.
A good activity to use for the sense of hearing is for the adult to record a variety of sounds heard in the environment (fire engine, bird chirping, alarm clock going off, dog barking, etc..) and play the tape for the toddlers and ask them to identify each sound. The recording should be stopped after each sound to allow the children time to identify the sound.
The adult might even need to play some individual sounds over to assist the child in identification of the sound. The adult and the children could also discuss action associated with each sound. For example when we hear an alarm clock this means it is time to get up and etc.
Sensory activities can be very fun and inexpensive. The activities involving the senses which can be done with toddlers are many and invite the adult to be creative in designing the activity.
