Ever since birth, children use their five senses – sight, smell, taste, sound and touch – to navigate around. Before they can use books, these five senses are the tools they use to understand the world around them.

People tend to underestimate just how important such sensory exposure is for children; it develops their young, impressionable minds by building entirely new nerve connections in their brain’s pathways. This ultimately leads to long-lasting, positive outcomes on their mental, emotional and physical development.

Needless to say, there happen to be many benefits of sensory play for children:

New Language Skills

Playing with different textures, tastes, smells and sights opens an entire new avenue of exploration for children. And with new ways of perceiving an object, comes new ways of describing it – now, the sand is more than just sand: it’s soft, and it smells earthy. It can feel dry on the skin, or damp and clumpy if it’s mixed with water.

Learning newer ways of describing their surroundings gives children a stronger grip on vocabulary words from a younger age. This exposure to different words and phrases helps improve their language skills for the long-run.

Positive Cognitive Development

Cognitive skills are skills we use when we have to solve problems and create ideas from scratch. All this stems from observation – the better you observe something, the better you can process information.

Sensory play exposes children to this style of thinking and interaction from an early age. Through sensory experiences, they understand what their observing by storing everything in their “sensory memory”. Later, when they face something foreign, they often have to extract from this “sensory memory” pool and create new ideas. The fact that children start adopting this behaviour of recalling cognitive memory is what further strengthens their problem-solving and decision-making skills.

Improve Focus

When children come across a box full of sand, or a tub full of water, most of the times they will direct all their attention towards it. It may even come to a point that you can’t get them away from their new-found activities!

This isn’t necessarily a bad habit – in fact, you’re witnessing your child improving their focusing abilities.

Sensory play helps children develop an early ability to focus on the task at hand. They automatically screen out irrelevant stimuli surrounding them, and give attention to what’s important. Children end up building larger attention spans and capabilities to understand complex things – which only spells success for a child’s educational development.

Promotes Social Interaction

Whether your child is making mud pies, collecting flowers or following snail trails with other children, they aren’t just playing around. They share newly found knowledge, talk about what they’re experiencing with excitement, and ultimately build on their self-confidence. Interpreting their sensory interactions verbally through a simple “show-and-tell” helps children feel in control, and become more self-reliant.

All these benefits from sensory play are skills people inevitably develop – but exposing them in children from an early age can do wonders for their early development. Nurseries in Jumeirah keep this in their minds – especially Oakfield Early Learning Center. In fact, this happens to be one of the key principles in their entire vision: to develop children’s minds with more than just books. They offer special times of the day solely for fun, exploratory sensory activities – playing with sand, water, and a lot more.

To say that the impact these activities can leave are monumental is no understatement. So next time you see your child laughing while they dig their hands into play-dough, don’t worry – laugh along!