Valentines Day Sensory Tray and Play Toddler Activity

Valentine’s Day Sensory Tray and Play Toddler Activity

Valentine’s Day Sensory Tray

With Valentine’s Day just a day away, we wanted to create a fun sensory tray that you can put together for your kids to play with.

We love creating sensory bins and trays for our son to play with. We have seen that sensory play has been really good at keeping our son engaged and interested in play.

As we have noted in some of our past sensory play posts, sensory play is excellent for a young child’s cognitive development and for developing fine motor skills.

Creating a Sensory Bin On a Budget

Creating a sensory bin or tray can be fairly inexpensive and easy to put together. To source the items, you can check stores like Dollar Tree, Dollar General, Wal-Mart, Target, Michaels, Jo Anns, and Hobby Lobby.

We have personally found that the dollar store is an excellent source of sensory items as they usually have small manipulative toys available. These toys and items can come in bags with multiple items all for just a Dollar!

You can oftentimes find bags of pipe cleaners, construction toys, and items, small landscape toy items, pebbles, decorative stones, and many, many more items.

One of the best things about the Dollar Stores selection is that they rotate items based on the time of year and holiday.

What’s In This Sensory Tray

This sensory tray that we created has:

• Fake rose petals
• Red and pink heart necklaces
• Red, pink, and white pom poms
• Red and pink heart cut-outs
• Red craft paper shavings
• Red pipes
• Homemade red playdough

Benefits of Sensory Play

1. Sensory play aids in cognitive development
2. It helps children develop fine motor skills
3. Sensory play helps build new neuro-pathways and develops a child memory
4. Sensory play helps a child develop problem-solving abilities

Sensory Play Is Fun!

Kids just seem to naturally gravitate to playing well with sensory items. They can explore their own imagination and creativity by creating their own play world and get some great cognitive benefits at the same time.

What sensory activities do your children like to play with? Let us know down in the comments below.

Happy Valentines Day!