A Senses-Themed Play Date

Since we already had a bunch of fun things leftover from this week’s classes at Bright Minds, Grae and I decided to put them to good use by creating a senses-themed play date for she and her little buddy from downstairs.  Here’s a peek at our very simple materials…

Smelling pots!  Place a damp cotton ball inside an inexpensive salt or pepper shaker, add a couple of drops of essential oil, and you’ve got yourself a fun way to stimulate your little one’s sense of smell.  I made these at the beginning of the week and they smelled just as wonderful today.  Our scents included orange, lemon, peppermint, lavender, and vanilla.

Sound shakers!  These are little sodium bicarbonate (baking soda) containers that I purchase by the dozen and try to repurpose as much as possible.  In order to make a little guessing game focused on sound, I placed different materials in each one (popcorn kernels, large marbles, coins, water, rice, and salt), then popped the lids on and sealed them with a piece of washi tape.

Feely fingers!  These are simply {doubled up} vinyl gloves filled with different materials that are really interesting to touch and squeeze.  Our fillers included water beads, water, coloured pasta, slime, flour, dry chickpeas, rice, and ice (which was still in the freezer).

In addition to our guessing games, I also had a big batch of our favourite slime on hand, along with some cookie cutters and silicon moulds.

Gracen wasted no time getting into the slime while waiting for her little friend.

Slime has long been a favourite sensory material of ours and it truly never seems to get old.

As soon as our little guest arrived, he got in on the fun too.

After lots of slime play, the munchkins asked to check out the feely fingers.  The squished and poked the hands while we talked about how they felt.  Lots of great words were thrown out, including bumpy, hard, squishy, soft, wobbly, crunchy, mouldable, and my personal favourite – ‘gushy glimey goo’.

Next it was time for our sound shakers.  We shook each container individually and the munchkins described the sounds they heard and made guesses as to what was in the containers before we opened them up.

Between the two of them, they managed to guess every single one!

Next up, we moved onto our smelling pots.  They loved this game.  We opened one pot at a time, passing them around slowly while sniffing up the scents.  Some of the guesses were bang on, and others were just down right hilarious – ‘clouds’ and ‘dirt’ included. ☺

‘Hmmmm…. What could this be??’

My favourite was when Miss G’s little friend opened up the peppermint scented pot.  His eyes immediately lit up and he shouted, ‘TOOTHPASTE!!!!’  And the scent they both loved best?  Vanilla.

Afterwards it was back to the slime…

We played for a while and then I asked if they’d like to try something new.  Both agreed enthusiastically, so I brought out a container of glass gems for them to add into their play.

The hard, shiny gems provided a really neat contrast to the soft, stretchy slime.  Both kids loved how the gems slowly sank into the slime and all sorts of creations began appearing.  Many ‘chocolate chip cookies’ were prepared…

And even more ‘cupcakes with candy sprinkles’ got made.  The really fun part is that these eventually turned into mini treasure hunts when the gems disappeared completely.

After hunting down all of our gems, we tidied up and headed outside for a good hour and a half of outdoor play.  Play date success.

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