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Home › Articles › Development › Toddlers Making Messes

Toddlers Making Messes

How Toddlers Discover Their World

By Teri Brown

Pages:  1  2  

According to King, proprioception is also responsible for helping us grade the force of our movements such as when you pedal harder on a bike when you begin going uphill. "These senses are very important for child development," says King. "Exploring these senses helps a child to develop the body awareness necessary to ride a bicycle, climb on playground equipment or do a cartwheel."

Exploring the Senses
King says it's very easy to incorporate sensory play into everyday life. Children will incorporate sensory play into their lives automatically. It's the parent's job to support this as much as possible.

"Follow the child's lead and let her get really messy every now and then," says King. "Encourage the child to play on playground equipment in different ways such as climbing up the slide instead of always sliding down or swinging on your belly instead of on your bottom."

It's important to remember that no one sense works alone. King says our brains are designed to integrate the information from each sense and use that combined information to interact with people and objects in our environment. Providing toddlers with sensory play every day challenges them to integrate new sensory information (or to integrate sensory information in new ways), which promotes increased body confidence with movement and better motor coordination.

Down and Dirty

Use the following tips to help your child have some ooey gooey, messy fun – and learn some important skills at the same time!

Touch
  • Fill a cardboard box with dried beans and/or uncooked rice. Use the box as a sandbox. Hide small toys in the beans, and let the child find them.
  • Fingerpaint with yogurt or pudding. Add oatmeal to the pudding/yogurt to change the texture a bit.
Taste
  • Offer a variety of tastes during each meal.
  • For older toddlers, ask them to taste a food and decide if it is sweet or sour.
  • Have your child close her eyes and then place a taste of a food on her tongue. Ask her to guess the food.
Smell
  • Ask your child to close her eyes, and let her smell a food. Take the food away and ask her to guess what it is. Use oranges, onions, pickles and other foods with strong aromas.
Vision
  • Play "I Spy."
  • Place a pile of small toys in front of the child and ask him to find one particular toy (find the red block, find the car with a blue stripe, etc.).
  • Do simple puzzles and formboards to help children develop their visual perception skills.
Hearing
  • Make animal sounds.
  • When you're at the park, play the listening game. See if the child can name the sounds he hears with his eyes closed (children laughing, cars zooming by, birds chirping, etc.).
Vestibular
  • Swinging.
  • Bouncing on a gym ball.
  • Jumping.
Proprioception
  • Climbing on a jungle gym.
  • Playing tug-of-war.
  • Jumping off a sofa onto a pile of pillows.


Pages:  1  2  


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