Engage Your Preschooler’s Senses: 10 Interactive Activities
As your toddler grows older, they will be super tempted to explore their senses. And you will be able to see that in action most of the time!
Cannot think of an instance right now? Well, think of the time when they put that bright yellow rubber duck in their mouth. That should ring some bells!
That said, your motive should not be to discourage your child from exploring their senses. Rather your focus should be on channelling their exploratory energies into interactive activities that can help them safely comprehend their senses while having some wholesome fun!
Here is a list of interactive learning activities that engage all the 5 senses of your child!
- Match the sound
- Sorting game
- The popcorn maker
- Sandpaper fun
- Taste test
- Sound of water xylophone
- Collage full of textures
- Visual tracker
- Scented playdough
- Sensory goodie bag
This interactive learning activity example is driven towards improving your child’s auditory skills. Besides, it can also teach them the importance of staying quiet and listening.
For this one, you will need a dozen plastic eggs, which you can fill with child-friendly items such as grains, building blocks, marbles, beads, shells and more. Once full, get your child to pick up each egg, asking them to shake them one by one and identify the object within just via the sound made.
The great thing about this particular sorting game is that it has been designed to involve all of the 5 senses of your child. It basically teaches them about the different sensory organs in our body.
To play this game, get 5 colourful plastic mugs and label each of them as one of the five senses. Place objects or items corresponding to each sense on a tray and ask your child to sort those objects into the correctly labelled cups. For example, sand will go into the cup labelled ‘touch’ and so on and so forth.
Of the different interactive learning activity examples on this list, this one is really fun to try! In fact, it can be a good bonding exercise for you and your child.
The next time you make popcorn, get your child involved in the entire process. Make them feel the grains, have them hear the sound of it popping, let them watch it change its state from seeds to popcorn, and finally let them smell and taste it.
For this interactive learning idea, you will need two different sheets of sandpaper and child-safe watercolours.
Cut out the shape of a circle from the sandpaper and let your child fingerpaint it in the colours of the sun. On the other sheet, ask them to do the same so you can cut out sun rays from this sheet. Once the paint dries off, stick the sun and its rays together and let your child’s imagination and senses soar.
This sense of organ activity is perfect for preschoolers!
Why?
Because your child will simply love it!
Get five different flavours of ice cream, cover your child’s eyes gently with a cloth and make them blind taste test each flavour! Blind taste testing will really activate their senses of taste and smell as they try to accurately guess the flavour they are being fed!
If your kid is a bit of a music lover, they will really enjoy this activity! More so because this idea focused towards sharpening your child’s auditory senses.
Fill 3 to 4 glasses with water ensuring each of the glasses have different levels of water in them. Now give your child a spoon and make them gently each glass with the given spoon, asking them to really notice the sound each tap makes every time a different glass is used. Encourage them to play around with the taps and create symphonies of their own.
The great thing about craft paper is that it comes with several textures. You can use this to your advantage in teaching your kids about the different feel of different types of textures. For example, if the craft paper feels soft or rough, smooth or ridged, grainy or bumpy. Create a collage of different kinds of textured paper and have your child label each sensation as they run their fingers through the papers. You can even try different materials such as wood, wool, metal etc.
Warning! This activity is super colourful!
To train your child to distinguish between different colours, you can get an assortment of different coloured bottle caps. Now correspond the colour of the bottle caps with the colours of pompoms. Jumble the two up in a play bucket and ask your child to find and match the bottle caps and pompoms of the same colour.
Children have the capability to identify tons of different smells. The only thing is that they may not be able to label all of them. A simple nose test can get your kid to learn all about different types of smells and what they are called!
Get unscented playdough and a bunch of food-safe artificial flavours. Add a few drops of each flavour to different mounds of playdough, knead the mix well and freeze for a few hours. Once out of the fridge, have your kid identify each flavour just by smelling the mounds.
If you want to challenge all of the 5 senses of your kid at the same time, this activity is perfect!
For this one, you will need to pick out a goodie bag and fill it with different kinds of random objects that are associated with each sense. For example, colourful clips for vision; scented erasers for smell; small balls of wood and metal for touch; pieces of candy for taste and wind-up toys for sound. Have your child sift through the bag to identify which object represents which sense.
You can even try interactive virtual learning activities on your favourite learning app or by scouting the internet for them. As long as you incorporate a mix of the activities above, teaching your child about the different senses will end up feeling a lot easier. At EuroKids, we conduct similar sensory and engaging activities to teach preschoolers a multitude of things, from science to maths, languages and more. For more information on how we do it, visit us.
