Preschool sensorial activities can be any number of exciting games or projects. To give you an idea of how stimulating a child’s senses can be educational and fun, these 5 sensorial exercises were chosen because they engage children to utilize their senses.
- Balloons and Balls – Put a small rubber ball in a balloon before you inflate it. Preschool children can bounce the ball around inside the balloon and learn how to use their fine motor skills to make the ball roll instead of bouncing. This exercise is great for fine motor skills and can be scaled up a bit to explore centrifugal force by adding more balls or substituting coins for balls altogether.
- Shapes and Colors – Building blocks and authentic Montessori tools like the Pink Tower help children learn to recognize shapes, sort by shape, color, and size, and arrange objects in a logical sequence. This activity helps develop fine motor skills and teaches important concepts that will be used over and over as time goes on.
- A Xylophone – A xylophone makes a great musical instrument for small children. This is a great way to introduce kids to the idea of making musical sounds with their own hands and, as they say, march to the sound of their own beat.
- Scents and Tastes – From wildflowers to lunch, scent and taste play a big part in how we recognize things. Fun activities that involve scent and taste are things like trying out new foods, trying to recognize something by its scent, learning about the different types of taste.
- Blindfold Games – Pinning the tail on a donkey is a good blindfold game to play, but ramp up the stakes a little and create activities that require moving about the room and finding items without the use of eyesight. Moving around and manipulating items without vision is a practical experience that teaches empathy for others and critical thinking skills that help solve problems of all sorts.
If the activity involves the five senses, it has sensorial value for small children. At school and in the home, encouraging children to use their senses in a variety of ways helps them hone essential skills that have evolved to make it easier to navigate the world we live in.