Christmas Sensory Tray

Guest post from Adele Crozier, Childminder & Blogger from Playful Learners.

Introduce your little ones to the festive season with this exciting sparkly sensory tray activity and watch their face light up as they dive into play. Setting up this Christmas activity is a lovely way to celebrate and brighten up the mood indoors when outside is cold and miserable.

I choose to stick Christmas baubles, tinsel and 4 metres of gift wrap in our Tuff Tray last Christmas, you could also add Christmas lights or beads on a string. This was plenty to keep the children interested and busy.

Within seconds the babies had noticed the tray coming out and were excited to see what I was putting in it for today’s play. Once I started to unwrap the paper Tinnie crawled over and dived into the tray to start playing. I love to do activities like this because you can see the different stages and ways in which the babies play.

While Tinnie enjoys throwing the balls up in the air and covering the balls with the wrapping paper, L sorts the tinsel removing it from the tray and then pulling it back in again before repeating the process. Sorting is currently a favourite way of play for L and he loves Heuristic play.

Occasionally looking at each other to interact and laughing at each other the babies enjoy playing parallel and involved in their own play. Tinnie went on to pick up and move the tinsel over the paper listening to the noise it made and L enjoyed throwing the baubles to me and then trying to catch them when rolled back.

Activities like this are great for encouraging older children to play together and invite the little ones to interact and play sociably.

Links to Development Matters

Personal, Social and Emotional Development:

• Seeks to gain attention in a variety of ways, drawing others into social interaction.

• Builds relationships with special people.

• Interacts with others and explores new situations when supported by familiar person.

• Engages other person to help achieve a goal, e.g. to get an object out of reach.

 

Communication and Language:

• Has a strong exploratory impulse.

• Concentrates intently on an object or activity of own choosing for short periods.

• Pays attention to dominant stimulus – easily distracted by noises or other people talking.

 

Physical Development:

• Crawls, bottom shuffles or rolls continuously to move around.

• Passes toys from one hand to the other.

• Holds an object in each hand and brings them together in the middle, e.g. holds two blocks and bangs them together.

• Picks up small objects between thumb and fingers.

 

Tuff Trays are available in packs of two.