St. Patrick’s Day Preschool Sensory Play Activity

St. Patrick’s Day Preschool Sensory Play Activity

Preschool Sensory Play Activity

We post a fair amount in regards to sensory play on our site and for good reason. Sensory play is foundational for young developing children to build fine motor skills, problem-solving, imagination, and language skills. Today’s post is a new sensory tray that we put together in a St. Patrick’s Day theme.

What’s In Today’s Sensory Tray

This St. Patrick’s Day-themed sensory tray utilizes multiple items. We included fake green grass, some small black cauldrons, homemade playdough, rainbow dyed elbow macaroni, plastic gold coins, and some dyed faux feathers in yellow and green color.

We sourced the black cauldrons, feathers, and plastic gold coins from our local dollar store. The rainbow elbow macaroni was homemade from plain elbow pasta and we then used different colored tempera paints and hand sanitizer to mix in the macaroni for that color.  The green playdough included in this tray is also homemade.

What I love about sensory play is that they are so easy to put together and they are relatively inexpensive. Even better than that is that kids naturally gravitate to sensory play. The items used in sensory play are open-ended and have endless options in combining manipulatives for a theme and/or child’s interest. Including various sizes, colors, and textures that can evoke the five senses.

What Is Sensory Play?

Sensory play is any activity that stimulates your child’s touch, taste, smell, sight, or hearing. Using sensory tables and trays helps kids to encourage children to explore their creativity and problem-solving skills.

We have also found that when our child plays with sensory items, the environment gives off a vibe of excitement from the creations of items based on the manipulatives, the mood in the room is calmer with more concentration and the conversations that arise during the play spur on great knowledge to learn how our little one is thinking.

We encourage sensory play in your home if a parent feels it’s a great fit for their family. It may seem stressful and daunting to arrange items together. The idea is to put items found in the home or additional substitute items from the store to create a fun tub of new items with different combinations to promote creativity and fun that are age-appropriate and fit the needs of the child. Some items would need to be bigger pieces especially if the child is placing items in their mouth for risk of choking. Depending on the age of the child, the sensory items will vary.

Comment below what sensory item(s) your children enjoy using in your home and which ones have benefited or not benefited them.

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