As your toddler starts growing up, they are going to become more and more curious and start licking and touching random things around them. Your little pre-schooler will start to explore their new surroundings. They are going to enjoy seeing various colours and shapes, smelling odours, and hearing new sounds. It is important for your pre-schooler to explore all five senses.

Hear, touch, smell, see, and taste! Attuning to their five senses—sensory and sensorimotor—will promote your child’s motor, fine, and cognitive skill development.

In this blog, we are going to look at some interactive learning activities for your new pre-schoolers that will involve all five senses.

Our five senses include

• Hear 
• Touch 
• Smell 
• Taste
• Sight

Engaging your toddler in sensory play is one of the best ways to provide them with the opportunity to explore their senses and let them explore their imagination and creativity.

Before we look into these activities, let us first understand what sensory development is and why it is important for your pre-schooler.

Sensory development refers to the development of your child’s five familiar senses, as mentioned above. It involves the way your toddler’s nervous system receives input from these senses and will then form an appropriate motor or behavioural response to their surroundings. This is known as sensory integration, or sensory processing.

If your pre-schooler has just one problem with any of the sensory systems, it can greatly affect a child’s overall development. So it is very important for you, as a parent or their teacher, to keep an eye on your toddler’s growth and encourage them to learn through learning activities for their normal development. 

Let us look at some learning activities that include five senses for your toddlers and pre-schoolers.

1. Hearing 

• Water Xylophone: Toddlers love music! You would have noticed how your child reacted to one of their favourite songs whenever you played it. If your child is someone who loves music, they will surely love this activity. Take some similar-looking flower vases; you can also use glasses or cups. Start by pouring water into these glasses. Ensure that the water in these glasses is at different levels. Now give your child a spoon and ask them to tap each glass or vase gently to generate a sound. Each glass or vase will generate a different sound depending on the water levels in each container. Your toddler will surely enjoy this activity

• Sound Matching Game: This game will help your child hone their listening skills. This will teach your child the importance of being quiet in serious situations and also develop their problem-solving skills. You need several plastic eggs in different colors. Begin by filling two eggs with random items such as beans, paper clips, beads, rice, and so on. Now ask children to pick each egg up, shake it, listen to it, and then determine the type of sound coming from it. Once they figure out the sound, they should place it with the egg that made a similar sound.

2. Smell 

• Scented playdough activity: Your child will smell a lot of things once they start exploring, but often they won’t be able to distinguish these smells. This activity will help your child understand those scents. Give some white, unscented play doughs to children along with some artificial flavours like strawberry, lime, vanilla, and a food colouring. Then divide these play doughs and add some colour and flavour to each. Knead the dough and freeze it. Once these colours are fully absorbed in the dough, give these sectioned doughs to your pre-schoolers and check if the kids can recognize the smell of each dough.

3. Touch

• Texture collage play: This is one of the messy activities, and your toddler will surely love it. Get a large sheet of paper and find as many items of different textures as you can. You can choose beads, feathers, and leaves, fabrics, even wood and metal. Then apply glue to the paper, stick these items together, and create a beautiful collage. Then ask children to close their eyes, run fingers through these textures, and identify them.

4. Taste 

• Ice cream activity: Ice cream is one of the most favorite foods for children, so this activity will surely be loved by them. This will also satisfy their taste buds! All you need are different flavours of ice cream. Add them in different cups. Later, blindfold the children, feed them a spoon of each flavour, and let them guess the flavour.

5. Sight 

• Visual tracking- the most common and easiest method of tracking is following a colour. This activity will improve children’s visual tracking skills as well as their logical thinking abilities. Start by gathering as many water bottle caps as you can. Colour these water bottle caps with different bright colours using markers or paints. Now get some pom-poms and put them on the floor along with the bottle caps. The children will find the pom-poms with the same colour of bottle caps and put the pom-poms in the bottle caps with matching colours. You can ask children to close their eyes while doing this activity.

Now that you know these learning activities, as a parent or a teacher, you can include these five senses learning activities in their playtime so that they can develop their imagination and creativity.