Sensory Play and Sensory Bins
We’ve talked a bit about sensory regulation, how it works, and why it is essential. So, how can you expose your child to different sensory experiences and stimuli? Through sensory play!
What is sensory play?
Sensory play is a play that incorporates the senses. This may not seem very easy, but it happens all the time! Sensory play can be riding a bike, playing with play dough, or watching a lava lamp or sensory bottle. There’s no right or wrong way to do it, but when you intentionally seek out a format of play that involves multiple senses, you can find a lot of great activities for kids!
Why is sensory play important?
This type of play introduces your child to different sensory experiences, which is a way for them to learn how to manage those experiences and improve their fine and gross motor skills, language skills, and social skills. Sensory play also helps build and develop the neuro pathways that allow the brain to process the different sensory stimuli.
Benefits of Sensory Play
Sensory play helps with the development of fine motor skills and gross motor skills. These activities involve much tactile play that helps build hand strength and grasp. They also involve gross motor activities such as crawling, jumping, or even using the core to remain balanced and sitting upright.
Sensory play also helps with the development of language, problem-solving skills, social skills, self-regulation, emotional development, and more. The goal of sensory play is to have an activity that involves new things, so these activities can prompt questions or opportunities for your child to work on their language skills. These activities also help build problem-solving and social skills as a child has to work with others and communicate how to complete the activity and work through anything that pops up. Most importantly, sensory play is an opportunity for a child to explore their environment.
Sensory play can be:
Tactile- involves the sense of touch. Have your child play with different textures, such as slime, silly putty, cloud dough, or play dough. Mix in other things, such as beads or glitter!
Visual- involves the sense of sight. Watching a lava lamp or making a sensory water bottle is excellent!
Olfactory-involves the sense of taste. Have your child help make cookies or help with an activity such as making ants on a log or dirt pudding cups. These fun snacks involve lots of different tastes and textures.
Sound-involves sound. Such as a game of musical chairs or having music in the background to help them calm down.
Scent- involves the sense of smell. Add essential oils to your child’s play dough or cloud dough.
Proprioceptive- involves the sense of body awareness. Activities such as crawling through tunnels or huddling under a weighted blanket will help give your child proprioceptive input.
Vestibular- involves the sense of movement. Games such as jumping rope, running, jumping, and kicking can help stimulate the vestibular system.
Sensory Bins
Sensory bins are a great way to involve a lot of different senses! Sensory bins are pretty straightforward, so they can be as simple or complex as you’d like them to be.
The basis of a sensory bin is a small bin or container filled with some element, like sand (kinetic, colored, or regular), dough, water beads, shaving cream, etc. Then you can mix other ingredients such as toys, beads, rocks, erasers, etc. The more textures, the better! You can make this into a theme, such as a sea-themed or archaeology box with treasure.
Involve fine motor skills by having different cups and spoons, and have your child fill up the cups. You can also have them collect as many elements as possible from the bin. For example, you can have the goal of having them collect ten rocks.
Here are some examples of the ones we’ve made:
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Li, Pamela. “Benefits of Sensory Play and 21 Sensory Activities for Preschoolers,” Parenting for Brain, 28 June 2022, https://www.parentingforbrain.com/sensory-activities-importance-sensory-play/.
“What Is Sensory Play? The Benefits for Your Child and Sensory Play Ideas,” Cleveland Clinic, 18 March 2022, https://health.clevelandclinic.org/benefits-of-sensory-play-ideas/.
“Why Sensory Play is Important for Development,” Educational Playcare, 27 October 2016,
https://www.educationalplaycare.com/blog/sensory-play-important-development/.