Sensory Play Ideas for Your Toddler or Preschooler
If you're looking for fun and educational sensory play activities for your toddler or preschooler, look no further. We have a roundup for every age.
Medically reviewed by Bree Lustre, MD
Playtime for kids isn’t just fun—it’s an integral part of their growth! As they begin to explore the world around them, play becomes the foundation for many of the skills they’ll need to thrive throughout childhood and beyond.
Play is fundamental in developing skills such as problem-solving, collaboration, creativity, and executive functioning, which is the process of how we learn, rather than what we learn. Since children are inherently wired to rely on their senses, a specific type of play—known as sensory play—helps them embrace and learn from them.
Here, we’ll cover what sensory play is, the different types of sensory play, and how to incorporate it into your child’s daily routine.
Related: What to Do When Your Child Is Overstimulated
What Is Sensory Play?
In a nutshell, sensory play describes play or activities that stimulate your child’s senses: sight, touch, smell, taste, and sound. It also promotes their sense of balance and body awareness.
“Play is the natural language through which a child communicates and processes their thoughts and emotions,” explains Suzanne Davis, LPC, RPT-S™, the owner and outpatient counselor of Davis Counseling & Play Therapy Center, PLLC.
Davis adds that sensory play refers to anything that incorporates the five senses, like digging in the sand, singing, listening to music, or playing with a textured toy. "The possibilities are endless and can be incorporated into daily routines for you and your child, regardless of their age."
Types of Sensory Play
While generally speaking, sensory play involves any type of activity that incorporates one or more of the senses, there are several types or categories of sensory play. Those different types include:
Visual Sensory Play: Improves a child’s sense of vision and visual processing with games like hide-and-seek, shadow puppets, and color-mixing activities.
Auditory Sensory Play: Helps children learn different sounds and improves their hearing skills. Activities include listening to or playing music, reading books, and playing clapping games.
Tactile Sensory Play: Stimulates a child’s sense of touch. This can include any activity that explores objects using their hands, such as playing with sand, play dough, or slime.
Taste and Smell Sensory Play: Explores a child’s sense of taste and smell with activities such as smelling flowers and tasting different foods, fruits, and vegetables.
Vestibular Sensory Play: Our vestibular system is located in the inner ear and helps us interpret movement, such as moving or standing still, going fast or slow, and which direction we’re traveling in. Activities include rolling, swinging, running, and jumping.
Proprioceptive Sensory Play: The proprioceptive system gives your body the ability to perceive its position in space and perform simultaneous actions without thinking (for example, running while dribbling a basketball). Activities include pushing, pulling, crawling, chewing, and blowing bubbles.
Luckily, each of these types of sensory play can be incorporated into your child’s daily routine!
How Does Sensory Play Aid in Child Development?
The big world can be intimidating to small children, and sensory play is beneficial in helping them navigate it. Here are some of the biggest benefits of sensory play:
Promotes Cognitive Thinking
Cognitive skills are ones that we use to solve problems and create new ideas from current ones. When children use their senses to explore objects and their environment, they create “sensory memories.” These memories help them understand and gain knowledge that they can draw upon when faced with new experiences and situations.
Sensory play is also helpful for building observation, counting, organizing, and sorting skills, which are all crucial during their school years.
Helps Regulate Emotions
Sensory play has a calming effect, helping children self-soothe and manage their emotions appropriately.
“When children feel overwhelmed or upset, they'll sometimes melt down, act out, or shut down completely,” explains Garcia. “Sensory play helps bring children back into their bodies, focusing on the five senses to help them regain a sense of equilibrium. It helps children learn to calm down in times of stress, and can help ground them as they work through life's challenges.”
Davis adds that sensory play is essential in how a child explores, connects, and understands their world through a neurodevelopmental lens.
“Sensory play supports mindfulness and provides healthy coping strategies to assist your child when they experience dysregulation, and also offers opportunities for co-regulation between yourself and your child,” she says.
Co-regulation is the process by which parents and caregivers help children learn to manage their own behaviors. It includes providing a warm, responsive relationship, creating a safe environment, and teaching self-regulation skills that promote independence.
Builds Fine Motor Skills
Fine motor skills in children involve actions such as reaching, grasping, and manipulating objects with their hands. Hand-eye coordination is also considered a fine motor skill.
Whether your child is squishing modeling clay, finger painting, or sorting blocks, sensory play is essential in building fine motor skills. Babies and young children need a lot of practice to build these skills, and incorporating sensory play is a great way to do so!
Improves Social Skills
Along with regulating emotions, sensory activities can also foster social relationships with peers, adults, and siblings.
In general, peer play allows your child to engage and communicate with others, which promotes problem-solving, negotiation, cooperation, teamwork, and taking turns. Research shows that children learn to use more sophisticated language when they play with their peers.
Related: Fine Motor Milestones
Sensory Play Activity Ideas for Different Age Groups
Overall, there is no right or wrong way to engage in sensory play, since you and your child get to be creative in a way that works for both of you, explains Davis.
Keeping this in mind, here are some fun sensory play ideas for different age groups:
Sensory Play for Babies (0 to 12 Months)
To stimulate your baby’s senses, here are some fun ideas:
Have your baby hold and shake a rattle
Gently touch and tickle your baby
Play music or sing songs
Play with a baby-safe mirror
Play with stacking rings
Allow your baby to touch different fabrics and textures such as cotton, wool, velvet, etc.
Play with blocks of different sizes
While reading a board book, have your baby help turn the pages while looking at the pictures
Play peek-a-boo and clapping games
Bounce, roll, and drop balls of various textures
Crawl over and under safe objects around the house
Fill a bowl or bucket with toys and objects of different shapes, colors, and textures (just make sure none of them are small enough to swallow!)
Sensory Play for Toddlers (1 to 3 Years Old)
The toddler years are perfect for exploring using sensory play! That said, you should always ensure that, depending on the activity, your toddler is able to play with certain objects without putting them in their ears or mouth. (You know your child best!)
Here are some sensory play ideas for toddlers:
Building and sculpting with play dough or kinetic sand
Finger-painting
Playing with a bowl of cooked and cooled spaghetti (so squishy!)
Filling a water bottle part of the way with water and adding glitter or food coloring (be sure to duct tape it closed)
Play in a ball pit (inflatable or plastic)
Create your own sand table: Fill a container or baking dish with sand and have your child explore the texture, bury toys, and draw shapes with their fingers
Use pots, pans, and spoons to create your own musical instruments
Take a walk outdoors and point out different sounds, from birds and other animals to cars, lawnmowers, etc.
Use a brush or have your child use their fingers to paint with shaving cream on a table or other flat surface (paper is too thin)
Go on a scavenger hunt around your neighborhood to find flowers (and smell them!), different textures (pinecones, grass, etc.), and more
Sensory Play for Older Children (3 Years and Up)
As your child grows, they gain more freedom when exploring their senses. Some sensory play ideas for your preschooler (and older child) include:
Playing with their food—literally! Some research suggests that preschoolers who participated in sensory play with real fruits and vegetables were more likely to try them, along with other new foods.
“Cooking” with nature to make pretend food using mud, sticks, grass, etc.
Jumping with jump ropes or on a trampoline
Letting your child help bake bread or cookies, especially pouring and mixing the ingredients
Play with water beads (safest for older toddlers and children)
Finding toys or blocks of different sizes and having your toddler sort them from big to small
Blindfold your toddler and have them guess different foods based on their taste
Play a game of hide-and-seek or I-Spy
Play with sensory toys such as fidget spinners, pop-its, squishy balls/creatures, spinning tops, and magnetic tiles
Doing art activities such as drawing pictures using scented markers
Use a line of tape on the floor, a log outdoors, or other safe surface as a balance beam
Create a sensory bin: Use pasta, rice, or beans, and add small toys of all shapes and sizes they can play with, cover, and bury using spoons and scoops
Related: An Age-by-Age Guide to Sensory Toys
How to Incorporate Sensory Play into Daily Routines
You may be incorporating sensory play into your child’s daily routine without even realizing it!
“Sensory play is fairly easy to add to your daily routine,” says Garcia. “If you look in your house, you will likely find at least a few items that can be used. The building blocks for sensory play are all around us.”
For example, she explains that rice can be poured into bins for a sensory tool, and soft objects, such as stuffed animals, can be held or squished. Blankets can also be wrapped and layered around your child to provide sensory stimulation.
You can also have your child explore the different textures of their clothes while they’re getting dressed, point out different smells while you’re cooking dinner, or play with toys in a bubble bath. Any activity that engages their senses is perfect!
Safety Considerations for Sensory Play
Just as you would when purchasing a toy for your baby or toddler, it’s important to ensure sensory activities are age-appropriate.
For example, children under 3 years old are more likely to put objects into their mouths, so items such as dry rice, small toys, or water beads are not safe.
When creating a sensory table, be sure that any material you use is non-toxic, and that all of the toys or objects are safe and should not pose a choking risk. Remember to sanitize any surface they will be playing on, and have them wash their hands after getting messy. Of course, for a child of any age, you should always ensure you’re there to keep an eye on them at all times.
Lastly, keep an eye out for overstimulation. If your child seems upset or overwhelmed by the activity, it might be best to take a break. “You, as the parent, are the expert to your child and are attuned to his or her needs to best support him or her in his or her development,” says Davis.
The Takeaway
Sensory play is a fun, educational, and crucial part of your child’s growth. That said, Garcia points out that sensory play isn’t just beneficial for kids—adults can benefit, too!
“How many of us come home from work tired, or feel stressed by the end of the day? Children pick up on these emotions, and it can sometimes turn into a negative feedback loop,” she says. “Getting in there and playing with your child helps the both of you calm down together, and turns that negative feedback loop into a positive one.”
Related: Our 11 Baby Book Subscription Picks to Foster Learning, Empathy, and Vocabulary
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