3 Ways: Sensory Play with Water & Toys

Sensory play is extremely important for kids, as it allows them to explore different feelings through touch and feel. By playing in this manner, kids who are sensitive to certain textures and feel of objects, can overcome their fear at a very early age.

Kids as we know them, love playing with water. But to give them a bit of variety, and to see that oh-so-very-beautiful smile, we come up with new ways to entertain them all the time. Here are 3 different water sensory play ideas that your kids are going to love. These ideas are for those rainy indoor weekends that get on everybody’s nerves!

What you Need:

1. A big tub/bin that can contain water.
2. Blue food color (optional).
3. Colored Paper & scissors.
4. Assorted toys (mentioned below)

All 3 ideas, start with some basic steps which include:

Filling the bin/tub with water (having a clear container helps, as it lets the kids see and explore properly) & using a few drops of blue food colour to make it a bit more interesting (you can skip this if you want to. I had some blue food colour lying around the house and so I decided to add a little colour to this project).

1. Fishing Expedition:

Since we are forever looking for fun affordable toys, I bought saw this fun fishing toy at a local dollar shop for $3. The fishing rod has a magnet attached to its end and there are screws on the fishes’ mouth. My daughter loved playing with these, and catching fish. You can even make something like this at home by attaching a magnet to a thread and attaching screws to bath toy fishes. But it was so much easier to buy these, and it didn’t even cost much!

2. Little Ducks:

Kids love playing with bath toys. To extend that play, or on the days when they cannot spend hours in the bath tub, bring the bath toys to them. It is a pretty simple idea, but one that is much appreciated by kids. Make it even more interesting by using straws and asking them to blow the ducks around. For a little older kids, who know how to blow a balloon, you can ask them to blow their balloons and then blow the ducks around with their balloons.

Oh, Why only the ducks!! Bring out all the animals!!

3. Paper Boats:

Take colorful cardpaper and make some very simple origami boats. Here’s how to make a simple origami boats, if you don’t know how to make one. You will find a lot of different variations for the paper boats. Canoe, jet boats etc. Once you are done with making these paper boats, your kids can row them in the water, or blow them around with straws or balloons.