Christmas Themed Sensory Play Activity
The Christmas Holiday Is Here!
With the Christmas holiday right around the corner, we put together a super easy sensory play toddler activity for our son Liam.
The tray was made up of Christmas-themed play items and a tray that we had picked up from the dollar store. The items in this Christmas tray contained,
- Green play trees
- Playdough (or in this case DIY playdough made at home)
- Felt gingerbread men
- Felt snowflakes
- Red, green, and white pom poms
- Green tray
- Cookie cutters
Why Sensory Play Is So Important To Developing Children
Sensory play has been shown to be very important to the cognitive development of young children. Children develop new neural connections in the brain when they engage all five of their senses, taste, touch, sight, smell, and hearing.
Engaging more of our senses while learning can even help adults to improve their learning abilities.
Sensory tables, plates, or trays are a great way to help improve your little one’s learning ability.
Ideas For Using Your Sensory Tray
The goal for creating your sensory tray should be to provide some variety in the objects that are included in the kit. Luckily for us, the dollar store had a good variety of holiday-themed items that we could include in this sensory set.
Our son used the cookie cutters that we had in order to cut out playdough and make fun shapes. He had cut out the shape of a gingerbread man and then used the different colored pom-poms to dress up the playdough. We even had him place trees in the playdough to make his own little forest.
The thing I like the most about sensory play activities is the possibilities are almost endless. The sensory kits that can be created are only really limited to your imagination. We could change up the Christmas kit maybe by adding in fake snow, or finding new Christmas themed items to add.
What do you think about these sensory play kits? How have you integrated sensory play with your little’s? Let us know your ideas in the comments!