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Home › Articles › Play Time › Sensory Play for Toddlers

Sensory Play for Toddlers

Can You Smell It?

Part Four

By Laura Cone

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Becausemost children relate to animals, include animals in the learning experience. Silberg suggests comparing the size of different animals' noses and talking about how some insects do not smell with their noses but with their wings.

Sensory Learning
Diane Trister Dodge, president of Teaching Strategies Inc., a publishing and training company based in Washington, D.C., and the author of Preschool for Parents: What Every Parent Needs to Know About Preschool (1998, Sourcebooks, Inc.), says toddlers are "little scientists" who explore with their senses.

"Infants and toddlers learn through their senses," Dodge says. "A young infant is going to put everything in their mouths. That's how they get a sense of what the object is. It's by hearing things, by touching things, smelling them, exploring them [that] they understand the world."

Dodgebelieves the primary sense for children is the sense of taste, which is connected to smell. "I just spent two days with my 18-month-old grandson, so I'm an expert on 18-month-olds," Dodge says. "They will explore for a huge length of time. If you watch them, that's the way they learn is by exploring objects. That's how the connections in the brain are made between brain cells, and that's what builds their brains."

She says it is important for parents to show an interest in everything their toddler does. "When you are feeding him food, talk about how it smells," Dodge says. "You expose them to different experiences and describe them and talk about them and put words to them."

Part of what makes people feel alive is their ability to smell flowers, the ocean or fresh-cut grass.Through sensory play, your toddler will know all the primary smells and more to interpret life's colorful and scented canvas.

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