Sensory Play
2/29/2020
Children use their senses to explore and understand the world around them. One of the most popular centers in our Early Kindergarten classroom is the Sensory Center. This center is designed to stimulate a child's senses: sight, smell, touch, movement, balance, and hearing. Sensory Play is crucial to a child's brain development and supports cognitive growth, language development, gross/ fine motor skills, social interaction and problem solving skills. This week, we have been learning about dinosaurs. This unit of study offers several sensory experiences for children. The students combined all purpose flour, coffee grinds, salt and water to create salt dough fossils. As they squished and kneaded the dough, they exercised the small muscles in their fingers. The same muscles that are used to write, color, cut and paint. The children enjoyed the smell of coffee as they sniffed the dough. This sensory activity also taught literacy, math, science and social skills. During the activity, I heard children note changes in shape and size by saying “My fossil is round” or “My fossil is small and yours is bigger”. They used several measuring tools and counted ingredients to make the dough. The students practiced literacy and language skills as they invented stories about their fossils. Lastly, they strengthened social skills by sharing, taking turns, and communicating with each other. Our sensory bin consisted of dinosaurs, plastic eggs and kinetic sand. The students were encouraged to use their creativity and fine motor muscles to squeeze, roll and flatten the sand. They packed the sand into plastic eggs and imagined that the dinosaur eggs were hatching.
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Anna RamseyArchives
April 2021
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