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Here is the third in a series of articles written by the talented Elaine, an Occupational therapist from littlesheeplearning.co.uk. Elaine also writes a blog that has news from Littlesheep Learning and the wider world of education and learning. She’s also featured in the free play-activities.com daily play activity emails.
When organising sensory play the sense of smell is often neglected as it takes slightly more thinking about and more organising in advance. The sense of smell is actually a lot stronger than we realise and we often link smells to items / events / memories in our life. To stimulate the sense of smell encourage your children to sniff the air and describe what they are smelling; smell flowers, foods and other odours.
Babies and young children can experience smelly play by using scented soaps during bath time and aromatherapy oils during baby massage. Scented candles or aromatherapy oil burners can be used to make a smelly environment too.
A smelling game can be made by collecting a selection of small (non see through!) pots with lids. Put a few drops of a scent onto a cotton wool ball and place a scented cotton wool ball into each pot and seal. Make a few holes in the lid so that the child can sniff the scent. Some possible scents are lemon, vinegar, vanilla, mint, lavender. Make pairs of pots to play a match the scent game.
Another smelling game is easy to set up by blindfolding children and placing familiar items in front of them. Through their sense of smell can they identify, toast, toothpaste, oranges, bananas, Marmite or strawberry jam? Can they sort daddy’s aftershave from mummy’s perfume and the baby shampoo / lotion.
Cooking is a great well to play with smells. When you are cooking with your child get them to smell the cocoa powder or ground ginger being put into the biscuits or cakes, smell the herbs and spices being put into the curry or marinade, can they smell the coffee in the coffee maker or the bread cooking in the bread maker or the fish cooking under the grill. What food smells do they like and which ones do they dislike?
Go for a smelly walk outside in a park or garden in the garden – smell herbs, flowers, compost, cut grass, the dampness after a rain shower, the smoke of a bonfire or barbecue.
Scratch and sniff books / stickers are also a great way to encourage children to use their sense of smell through incidental play.
Hopefully these ideas have helped you realise that smelly play can be just as much fun as other types of sensory play and be just as easy to initiate with a little bit of planning.
Elaine Lambe
Educational consultant
Elaine trained as an Occupational Therapist before working with children with autism on home based early intervention programmes. Through her work in the home she helped parents to support their child’s learning, implemented behaviour plans and assisted with teaching self help skills for example toilet training, self-feeding and dressing. She has also had experience of supporting children with special educational needs in mainstream schools, adapting the curriculum to make it accessible to them. After the birth of her first child, Elaine started Littlesheep Learning – www.littlesheep-learning.co.uk – an online store with an ever-growing range of teaching and learning materials for everyone who wants to help their children reach their potential.
There are so many great ideas and articles up at various carnivals in the last month. I have put together a selection of my favourites but you really have go to the carnivals themselves as this is a just a drop in the ocean with the amount of activities, ideas and articles you will find there.
So……….
Grab a lemonade, a window seat and this may take some time.
A post over at play library reminded me about travel toys as we planned our trip. This long cross country trip with a full car didn’t leave much space for kid’s things and that would be a problem…. or not.
One of the best pieces of advice I received was to buy a lap tray. We got ours from Walmart but they are everywhere. The oldest one used it for food, colouring, sticker books. Mum and Dad used it as well- bonus.
I packed a clear backpack full of activity books, sticker books, colour wonder pens and book, mini cars and action figures, dot to dot, mazes, little plastic insects (lizards)magic paint mini books, paper, pencils and colouring pencils ( I had the sharpener in my bag). There were lots of mini books from the market (sent by Grandma for the long journey) or from the local dollar store.
The oldest dipped in and out all trip. He passed over stickers, cars and paper to the little guy. Big guy hauled it in and out of the hotels and really loved finding new things to do- some alone and some with us.
DVDs- Mickey mouse was a runaway favourite.
During down time we even got in an Audio book. The Kite Runner-Fantastic book. That kept us hanging on the authors every word.
Another great piece of advice was when we stopped we always tried to find a park so the kids can burn energy. We found some great places. Tired and played out they were happy to go back into the car seats for a long time.
Post it notes- I saw this fabulous idea on a recent trip to Crater Lake. The car windows had a lovely display of pictures. The kids had drawn all sorts of things and then stuck them on the back windows. Easy clean up and compact. There were 3 different colours, so I assumed there were 3 kids in that van.
****What are you doing with your kids during those road trips? Why not leave a response below. Would love to hear your ideas.****
Also added a few different sized triangles and circles. ( happened to have them)
What to do
Make the shapes earlier.
Put one colour set in a bag that you can’t see into.
Keep the other colour set with you.
Hold up a shape. Name it. Reach into the bag and by touch alone try and locate it.
Pull it out. No matter if it’s the wrong one. Compare the shapes and ask if they are the same and what the name is. Answer any questions they can’t.
Put them side by side.
Variation: Find a bigger/smaller triangle
Let the kids be the caller and you dive into the bag sometimes. It’s fun without having to be competitive. The kids also learn their shapes quickly. They don’t need to learn the shapes. The idea is to have fun feeling in the bag and finding the same match. Hence why there’s a pentagon and a hexagon.
The little bag fits nicely into a pocket, purse or handbag. Great for those times when you’ve got time on your hands waiting for the ‘someone’. See my previous post for other ideas here.
This feely bag preschool play activity and other fun preschool play activities try our daily email of play activities see our sidebar for more information and to sign up.
Here is the second in a series of articles written by the talented Elaine from littlesheeplearning.co.uk. Elaine also writes a blog that has news from Littlesheep Learning and the wider world of education and learning. She’s also featured in the free play-activities.com daily play activity emails.
The most commonly stimulated sense for young children is sight. From birth, babies are given brightly coloured and patterned toys, and many children and adults learn best through their sight. This article gives a range of activities that are all focused on using visual skills.
One of the best ways to stimulate the sense of sight is to allow your child to experience as many different sights as possible. Take your child to as many different places as possible; shops, parks, libraries, the seaside, zoos and aquariums all provide varied things to look at. Exposing your child to new and interesting experiences will keep them curious about the world around them. While you are exploring these places, talk to you child about what they are seeing, tell them about the colours, the shapes, the names of the objects or even how it makes you feel.
Play with coloured or shaped objects – brightly coloured or shaped bean bags, balls, toy cars and bricks can be used for a variety of games which will stimulate the child and can help them learn their colours when used in play – for example, can you find the red ball, green car, triangular brick, star bean bag.
Make sight sensory bottles – collect together some old plastic drinks bottles and fill them with different objects for example; fluffy pompoms, glitter, bubbly water or coloured liquids. Let children experiment with these; they can shake them and watch the bubbles form and glitter sparkle, pretend to pour and watch the liquid slosh about or even experiment with mixing colours by holding a bottle of yellow dyed water in front of the blue dyed water to see green.
Make visually stimulating mobiles by hanging CDs from cotton by the window – watch them sparkle in the light and make ‘rainbows’. This can also be done using prisms and pieces of glass.
From an early age children enjoy ‘peekaboo’ games, these show the sight sensation of light and dark. Other games looking at light and dark that children will enjoy are playing with torches or fibre optic wands.
Mirrors are also fun for reflecting games and learning about symmetry – draw half pictures, for example an apple, or a face and use the mirror to make the other half to view the whole, what happens if you try this with half a clock face or the front half of a car? Use two or more mirrors together with a small object to see how many of them you can make (hint use the mirrors touching at one end to make a ‘v’ shape round the object).
Mixing water and food colouring will make colourful liquids. Get some plastic cups and fill with water and a selection of food colourings. Using droppers carefully drop one drop of a colour into the water, what happens if you add more than one drop? Or if you mix the colours?
A fun game using the sense of sight is ‘Kim’s Game’ where you place a number of familiar items on a tray, allow the children to view the objects for one minute and then cover. Ask the children to remember what they saw. An alternative is to remove an item and see if the children can recall the missing thing.
Finally, another visual activity is providing children with a variety of different viewing objects – sun glasses, magnifying glasses, coloured transparancies, binoculars and reading glasses. Look at different objects and describe what you see and how it differs between the different viewing objects.
As you can see from these suggestions there are many different visually stimulating activities that your child could enjoy to experience the sense of sight to discover colours, shapes, brightness and visual memory, these are just a few – the limitations are endless.
Elaine Lambe
Educational consultant
Elaine trained as an Occupational Therapist before working with children with autism on home based early intervention programmes. Through her work in the home she helped parents to support their child’s learning, implemented behaviour plans and assisted with teaching self help skills for example toilet training, self-feeding and dressing. She has also had experience of supporting children with special educational needs in mainstream schools, adapting the curriculum to make it accessible to them. After the birth of her first child, Elaine started Littlesheep Learning – www.littlesheep-learning.co.uk – an online store with an ever-growing range of teaching and learning materials for everyone who wants to help their children reach their potential.
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