Learning Through Play: Hide and Seek Sensory Play with Foam
At Green Leaves, we love the opportunity for a messy play session. This often involves traditionally messy ingredients such as paint, sand, slime, water, clay or mud. Messy play is a fun activity that encourages development of all five senses.
With no task or objective set, messy play allows children the freedom to explore while engaging sight, sound, smell, touch and taste (provided the activity is taste-safe).
These types of activities encourage curiosity, problem solving and creativity. It’s a great way to help build new neural connections in the brain, while encouraging language development and motor skills.
It’s easy to put together an activity with items you have at home. Shaving foam is a textural delight because it changes and re-forms in your hands. Adding colour enables swirls and patterns to form, while burying or hiding toys in the foam can add to the sense of discovery and play. Shaving foam encourages children to manipulate and mould materials, building their fine motor skills and coordination. It’s often calming and always fun!
What you need
- Shaving foam
- A large tray or container
- A collection of objects i.e. ocean animals, dinosaurs, Duplo pieces, or any toy or object you can easily rinse out later
- Food colouring (optional – you can dilute some food colouring in jars of water and provide some droppers so that your child can add colours to the foam)
Method
- Place your objects on the tray or container. Spray the shaving foam to cover the objects. At this stage, you can either add food colouring to the shaving foam or provide your child with the opportunity to add colours to the foam with some droppers.
