Like many OT’s I love encouraging my patients to engage in sensory play. Previous blogs have given suggestions for fun sensory play ideas for the great outdoors, but if you’re anything like me once it’s cold you’re not venturing out! I wanted to share some of my favorite sensory play activities for inside to keep your children busy while fostering cognitive, social, developmentall, and language skills. 

Sensory play is great for all kids, even those who are not currently being treated for sensory processing difficulties through occupational therapy. Sensory play helps children experience different textures, smells, sights, movements, and sounds through various play mediums. This is beneficial in so many ways. Sensory play helps the body learn to process these different sensations, it helps children learn body awareness and where they are in space, it can be calming or have an alerting effect, and it’s just fun. No matter the reason behind it sensory play is a great way to help fill your child’s day with new, fun, and engaging play activities. 

Here are six of my favorite sensory play activities for kids of all ages:  

Shaving cream is a great play activity, rub it on a mirror to practice writing letters, drawing shapes, or fun pictures! Or bury your favorite washable toys in it and dig around to find them. Add food coloring for more fun and the addition of a more intense visual stimuli. A taste safe alternative for younger children is using an electric mixer to whip the juice from a can of chickpeas into a foam. 

Shaving cream can also be a great way to incorporate self care skills such as hand washing or teeth brushing. Use a toothbrush and the bottom of a plastic pop bottle as your “tooth” and practice brushing all around it and in the crevices. Or practice brushing the teeth on a doll or other toys.

 For easy clean up do this play activity in the bathtub!

Cooked pasta is a great tactile play experience, add food coloring to the water when boiling to make fun colors. Let it cool, and add a little bit of water to make them slippery, then let the little hands dive in! Add in some of your favorite washable toys and containers to increase the imaginative play and fun. This is also a great activity for working on utensil use or cutting. Practice scoping and using a fork or snip the noodles with scissors to work on some of those self help and fine motor skills.

Water is a simple and easy sensory play activity. Fill a tub with some water, your kiddo’s favorite waterproof toys and some cups, big spoons, or measuring cups to encourage scooping, dumping, and pouring. To increase the fun, freeze water proof toys in ice cube trays or small containers of water then use dumping the water, hammers, or syringes of water to free the trapped toys. 

Sensory bins are a simple and inexpensive way to create sensory play experience. Some great sensory bin base items are rice and beans, oatmeal, easter basket grass or shredded paper, cotton balls or pom poms, sand (crush graham crackers or cheerios for a taste safe option), or water beads (use tapioca pearls for a taste safe alternative). Start with your base then add in scoops, tongs, toys, and containers. The joy of this type of play is it gives a base for your child’s imagination to run free and learn new ways to engage with everyday items. 

An obstacle course is one of the best ways to bring proprioceptive input into your child’s play, and get some of those wiggles out when we’re stuck inside. See Kelley Harlan’s ‘Let’s Make an Obstacle Course!’ blog post for some great information and ideas for your obstacle course. 

You can easily turn Kool-Aid packets into water color paints to create masterpieces with a fruity twist. Just mix the powder from a packet of kool-aid with a small amount of water to create your paint. Use the activity to talk about different scents, fruits, and colors with your kids. 

An added bonus to sensory play is that it opens an opportunity for discussion about new experiences and can help with language development. While doing all these activities talk to your child about what they are feeling, smelling, seeing, and hearing. Is it slimy, sticky, warm, or cold? Does it feel hard or soft? How does it make them feel? Help your child put language to what they are experiencing. Play is the best way for a child to learn, seize this opportunity to help them gain a new skill. Most of the time they’ll be having so much fun they won’t even realize how much work their brain and body is doing. Don’t be afraid to jump right in with them Mom and Dad, you deserve some play time too!

Sensory Play For When We're Stuck Inside

Being able to identify a child’s basic and physical needs such as nutritious food, shelter, warm clothing, and a reasonable bed time is obvious and easy to recognize. However a child’s mental and emotional needs are more difficult to identify and notice.

The environment you provide for your child each day holds many opportunities and chances for nourishing good mental health. Having good mental health helps and allows your child to learn and develop appropriate skills to influence, enhance, and improve communication and expression, social skills and interactions, emotional regulation, and confidence in themselves. Your child’s mental health is vital and plays a major role in their overall wellbeing. Here are some tips and strategies you can implement and apply in your daily lives to help support, encourage, and influence your child’s emotional, psychological, and social wellbeing.

1. Active Listening and Communication View your child’s behaviors as a window to their needs and feelings. Your child is communicating something. What is it? Be patient and engage in active listening before offering your advice. Take time to sit down and ask open ended questions, to gather information, promote discussions, and give yourself as a parent opportunities for validations. As parents you are trying to encourage communication, not to discourage it. Be mindful of how you respond verbally and emotionally.

2. Model Healthy Behaviors Children are influential and developmentally are constantly growing and learning. They are like little sponges soaking up everything around them. Children see how you handle stress, how you manage and deal with your feelings, how you problem solve, and how you communicate with others. It’s hard to model appropriate behaviors all the time but striving to model the behavioral and emotional responses you want your children to engage in.

3. Establishing Boundaries and Structure Consistency and structure are beneficial both for children and parents. Clear structure, rules, and expectations provide limits and boundaries. Children need boundaries without them they lose their way. They need clear rules and consistent consequences. But they need them to be delivered with love, understanding and kindness. Talking about the reasons for both rules and consequences helps children understand why they need to follow rules.

4. Building Relationships & Connections Making a connection and a bond with your child should be the upmost highest priority. Paying attention to your child’s point of view, thoughts, feelings, and concerns helps develop a bond and a healthy connection. Prioritizing time with your child is essential to developing the relationship. Scheduling or setting specific time aside for your child and family can only be beneficial for everyone.

5. Providing Praise Providing praise to children helps build and develop confidence and a sense of selfworth. By providing praise you’re showing your child you acknowledge them, your encouraging them, and helping them develop awareness to when they do well. Praise also influences feelings of being proud.

“We see how early childhood experiences are so important to lifelong outcomes, how the early environment literally becomes embedded in the brain and changes its architecture.” ~ Andrew S. Garner

How to Nurture a Child's Mental Health

With the unpredictable weather and virtual school instruction, it can be hard to find ways to keep your child moving and active! Obstacle courses provide a great way to allow children to work on a wide array of skills with one fun activity and just a few simple household items.

Obstacle Courses allow children to address multiple skills they may need to practice in one activity. By selectively choosing specific activities in your obstacle course, children can engage in activities that challenge them and build their own self-confidence no matter their age or abilities. Obstacle Courses build multiple skills that children will utilize throughout their daily routines including:

Tips and Tricks to Build an Obstacle Course at Home!

Work together with your child to brainstorm fun activities to include in your obstacle course. Some children will love to pick a theme (ex: volcanoes, sharks) and use their imagination throughout the entire course! Help your child identify activities that will provide an appropriate challenge and a sense of accomplishment. Based on your child’s age and abilities adjust the number of activities you may include in your obstacle course. Younger children or those who are working on sequencing and memory can benefit from 3-6 step obstacle courses, while older children and those whose strengths include planning and memory may be able to complete obstacle courses with 5-10 different activities.

So what activities can you include to address specific skills your child may need to work on? Below are some ideas for you to try and to spark your own creativity!

One of the great benefits of obstacle courses is that common household items can be used to foster challenges and fun for your child.

Ways to Make Your Obstacle Course More Challenging:

Ways to Make Your Obstacle Course Accommodating to Your Child’s Abilities:

Before engaging your child in the obstacle course you have created, review each step to ensure understanding and safety rules. This is especially important for children who have difficulty with planning, memory, and sequencing. Then, run through your obstacle course with your child! Have fun and enjoy watching your child work towards their goals while engaging in active play!

Let’s Make an Obstacle Course!

Are you concerned that your child is not talking? Most children say their first words around 12 months, and can expand their vocabulary up to 50 words by the time they are 18 months old! Children are so smart, and can often do this on their own. However, oftentimes there are children that need a little encouragement. Here are some tricks to get your child talking:

If you don’t see improvement in your child’s vocabulary after trying these strategies, it might be time to seek the help of a Speech Language Pathologist.

Addressing Early Language Skills at Home 

The holidays are right around the corner and while they are a time that should be filled with joy and family traditions, for families of children with feeding challenges this can also be a time of increased stress, worry, and frustration for parents and children alike. The good news is that the holidays offer endless opportunities to foster our children’s love of food and help them to learn about new foods in a non-threatening way. Here are some ideas for helping your child not only get through holiday meals but enjoy the experience and expand their interactions with new foods in the process.

Taking the Stress out of Family Gatherings

During the holidays many of us get together with family to share in special meals. Large family gatherings and meals can be especially challenging for children with sensory and feeding difficulties. The sensory experience can be overwhelming and may lead to meltdowns if their needs are not recognized and addressed. When our body is bombarded by sensory input without a way to accurately process that input, it goes into fight or flight mode and our digestive system takes a back seat while the body focuses on getting through the experience. It is important that we are aware of our children’s sensory arousal and are offering them strategies to make the experience more comfortable. Family gatherings are NOT the place to try to get your child to eat green bean casserole for the first time! Here are some strategies to decrease the stress and make gatherings a pleasant experience.

Social Stories: Social stories are a great way to talk to a child about activities that are coming up and prepare them for big events. Start reading a social story about your holiday plans a few weeks in advance to give them time to process what is coming.

If your child does not handle changes to routine or travel well, consider having family come to you.

If you do need to travel to a relative’s home, talk to them about having a quiet room where your child can retreat to if they need a break from all of the activity. Bring some favorite toys and activities with you to make your child feel more comfortable in the new environment.

Consider dimming the lighting to decrease the sensory input that your child is trying to process. Dimmed lighting can often help with calming an upset child (or an overwhelmed adult!).

Be aware that the smell of all of the various foods combined, while it may smell delicious to us, may be overpowering for our kids who are highly sensitive to smell, which in turn decreases their appetite.

Likewise, the sight of all of those unfamiliar foods on the table may be visually over stimulating for your child. Consider serving the food in another room and having your child sit on one end of the table instead of in the middle so that they are not surrounded by foods that they are not yet ready for.

Depending on the severity of your child’s aversions, having them eat prior to the large family gathering can reduce the pressure of eating with so many new foods around.

Often when we are with extended family or friends we have higher expectations of our children’s behavior than we do at home. Be mindful that children are not made to sit for long periods of time and engage in adult table talk. If your child has finished eating after 20-30 minutes and everyone wants to stay at the table to talk, allow your child to get up from the table and engage in a quiet play task while the grown-ups finish.

If it is going to result in a meltdown, do not use this time to encourage your child to try new foods. Make sure they have some of their preferred foods available and allow them to eat those at the family meal.

If your child is ready for it, they can take a small amount of the new foods and put them on their plate without the expectation that they will eat them all. If they are not ready for this step, don’t push it!

One of the best ways to get your kids to ultimately eat a wide variety of foods is to expose them to foods in a fun, no pressure way. The holidays afford so many opportunities to learn about new foods without any pressure to eat them, allowing children to build a positive relationship with food.

String popcorn: what a great tradition that seems to have gone by the wayside in recent years. Not only is your child learning to interact with food, they are getting to work on their fine motor skills as well! Add cranberries for increased exposure to new foods.

Make cookies: have your kids help by adding the dry ingredients, cutting out shapes with cookie cutters, rolling the dough into balls, decorating the final product, the possibilities are endless! Here are 19 Christmas cookie ideas for making with kids.

Create holiday themed art using foods: get your kids involved in making arts and crafts projects for teachers, grandparents and friends using foods in place of traditional art tools.

Make stovetop potpourri: this is such a fun activity that allows kids to work with aromatic dry ingredients. These make great gifts for teachers and therapists when packaged in individual plastic gift bags and smell so nice when you cook them on the stove in a pot of water.

Bring your kiddos into the kitchen and have them help with the meal preparation! If they are not ready to touch the foods being prepared, have them help by holding the bowl, reading the directions, or stirring the pot. Kids especially love when they get to use kitchen utensils. These kid safe knives are a great way to get them involved!

Give them some left over dough from cookies or pie crust, cookie cutters, nuts, or whatever other toppings you’d like and let them go to town building their own pies and cakes.

Have your kids help to arrange a veggie platter to take to a holiday party. Look at this cute Christmas tree veggie platter. Remember, they do NOT have to eat the veggies (but if they do want to try a bite we won’t stop them!)

Remember above all else, this is a time for building memories with your family. Focus on the activities that your children enjoy, there will always be time to work on the hard things later.

From Our Experts

Sensory Play For When We're Stuck Inside

How to Nurture a Child's Mental Health

Let’s Make an Obstacle Course!

Addressing Early Language Skills at Home

Holiday Feeding Recommendations