Creating sensory activities for toddlers is wonderful way to enrich a child’s life through play. Simply give them a few ideas utilizing their senses and allow their brain run wild. Sensory activities do not have to be expensive and many experiences can be created with items you have at home – for cheap (or free)!
It is important to note a variety of these sensory activities for toddlers are not using equipment and rather encourage play within daily life. Within our home we use a variety of items to ensure play is fun, creative and open ended. Sensory play is often a method we turn towards to build fine motor skills, gross motor skills and cognitive development. We tend to visit the Dollar Store and Home Goods to continue building our sensory play stash for cheap!
By engaging the senses (i.e. taste, touch, sound, sight and smell) there are a variety of ways to create simple activities to build sensory development. Sensory play activities also help to encourage brain development by encouraging problem solving skills and developing hand-eye coordination. Here is a list of 30 of our DIY sensory activities for toddlers!
Music Enrichment Sensory Play Ideas
Utilizing music can be a fun way to enrich a sensory play activity. If you have musical instruments at home, play ‘band’ together. Or sing songs while dancing in the living room. Use different materials to make different sounds.
- DIY Musical Instruments: Make a DIY musical instrument by putting jingle bells, beans, rice or beads in an empty container. Voila – instant shaker toy! You can even use an empty water bottle or spice container to make this sensory bottle. Just make sure to secure the lid with hot glue or super glue (allowing it to fully dry) before handing over to little one.
- Dance to the Music: Use scarves, tassels, wash cloths and even blankets to encourage movement while singing and dancing songs together.
- DIY Drum Set: Drum or tap on any surface while utilizing different materials and household items. Even use your hands to brush or drum the walls and various surfaces.
Water Play: The ultimate sensory activity
It is no surprise water play offers a variety of fun sensory activities for toddlers! Sensory play is endless with water play whether it be on a water table, at the beach or splash pad, within the sink or even in the bathtub. With all water sensory activities, ensure an adult is supervising the toddler at all times. We will definitely incorporate water play regularly when we welcome baby number two!
- Water Bead Light Show: Utilize water beads and a flash light. By placing hydrated water beads within a ziplock baggie, children can also squish them to their delight without the hazard of choking. Add in a flash light underneath the ziplock baggie and your child will have the sensory experience of a lifetime!
- Outdoor play: Get outside! Use the sprinkler, hose and even squirt bottles to cool off on a warm day.
- Splash pad: Hit up the local splash pad. There are often a variety of surfaces to touch and different streams of water to explore. Plus, who doesn’t love another way to build social skills!
- “Clean” the toys: If you have a water table, create different activities by using the running water. “Clean” dishes and toys with a toothbrush, squeeze out a sponge, and fill up cups or a small watering can.
- If you have toy cars, this is a great way to ‘clean’ the cars to get the dirt off!
- What Sinks – and What Floats:
- Test different items to see what sinks and what floats. Collect items from around the house or outside to see the effect of items on / in water. This is a great way to build cognitive skills!
- Frozen Water Table: Another idea for a water table is to incorporate frozen items. Whether this be a chunk of ice containing toys, frozen fruit or even ice cubes, this can be a great way to teach cool water vs. cold ice!
- Melt the Snow: If it is snowing, consider a ‘melt the snow’ activity. Begin by placing toys in a muffin tin. Place snow overtop. Melt with water using a turkey baster, cup of water or even tablespoons.
- It can also be fun to grab to toys from the snow and dunk them in the water to wash them off!
- Color the Snow: Another activity with snow is to bring snow inside via a muffin tin. Place drops of food coloring in each tin and allow the child to melt the snow. As the snow melts, colors will mix and also create new ones (IE red+blue=purple)!
- Play Kitchen Sink: We often use our play sink outside during the summer to have some fun water play. Our daughter loves running pretend vegetables under the sink and filling the cups with water to drink.
- Messy Play / Mud Kitchen: For messy play, consider taking fun activities like painting with shaving cream colored with food coloring and even making a ‘mud kitchen’ outside.
- A mud kitchen is made exactly how it sounds. Allow a child to have different utensils, including pots and pans, whisks, spoons, forks, etc. to create and combine materials from the outdoors. This can include mixing water with dirt or picking apart items like leaves, grass or flowers. This is a great activity to get engaged with your child (and get a little messy while you are at it).
Building Blocks
- Set them up, knock them down, organize them by colors, shape and size. The ideas are endless with block play! Try incorporating animals and other characters to play on the structures. This is a great way to teach opposites like ‘up’ and ‘down’.
Painters Tape
Painters tape can be a useful sensory activity for toddlers due to its sticky nature (without ruining paint n the wall).
- Tape Toy Rescue – Use painters tape to stick different colors and different textures items (i.e. blocks, household items, small toys, blocks, pom poms) to the wall.
- Floating bridge: Take tape and allow it to float between two stationary objects. Have the sticky side up. Begin sticking items to the tape. Additionally, this encourages hand eye coordination and problem solving. Our favorite items to stick to the bridge are are pom poms and random leftover sheets of paper.
- Balance Beam / Race Cars: Place painters tape on the floor and walk across it as a make shift balance beam. Alternatively, race cars up and down the tape.
Pom Poms
Pom poms are a cheap and inexpensive way to encourage sensory play activities. We bought a bag from the dollar store and use them weekly!
- Pom Pom Rescue: Place all the pom poms in a whisk and allow little one to experiment different ways to retrieve them.
- Scoop and Transfer: Pour pom poms into a bowl. Provide various utensils to scoop them out and transfer them from one place to the next (i.e. tongs, spoons, measuring cups, etc).
- Sorting practice: Use a muffin tin or another item with spaces to sort items. Additionally, sort the pom poms by size or color.
- Floating Pom Poms: Until pom poms are submerged in water for quite some time, they do not sink! However, they do take in some water. This can be fun for scooping and transferring, as well as picking them up and squeezing out the water!
Imaginative sensory play – Stickers, coloring, finger painting
Use your imagination and different materials to build and create art at home. For instance use glue and feathers, sparkles or beads, colored pencils, crayons, markers, chalk, stickers and paint to create pictures.
- Finger Painting (+ edible version): Finger painting can be a fun, messy play idea. If you have washable paint, try using it in the bathtub or take it outside! Finger paint with greek yogurt which has been colored with food coloring.
- Paint in a Ziplock bag: For little ones, place a few drops of paint on the inside of a bag and tape to a high chair. Allow little one to explore the paint (mess free) through the plastic bag while dragging fingers across the paint.
Beads
Wooden beads can be a fun way for 18+ months old to practice hand eye coordination and sorting skills. These sensory activities can also be completed with uncooked pasta (like Penne or Rigatoni noodles).
- Shoe lace: Attach a shoe lace to a handle or box. Knot one end. Encourage sliding the wooden bead onto the shoe lace to create a row of beads.
- Stringing items can also be completed on pipe cleaners.
- Stacking practice: Put dowels into a surface like a cardboard box or egg carton. Place the beads on the dowels, then remove them.
- Sorting Beads: If there are various beads (i.e. sizes, colors, textures), sort them into different piles or containers.
Texture Wall
This is the perfect activity for 6+ months. It also encourages a child to begin sitting independently. We love putting these items on our refrigerator door to have hands-free kitchen time!
- Texture Wall: Place a variety of textured ribbons, scrunchies, bubble wrap, plastic wrap or spinning items onto a wall. Allow them to explore the various textures and colors.
- If little one is beginning to stand up, encourage them more by placing items slightly out of their reach.
Toy Rescue
Toy rescue is the perfect sensory activity starting at 8+ months old.
- Toy Rescue: Grab a bowl, tin, bread pan, etc. and place toys within it. Add rubber bands over the top and allow little one to pull out each item. Bonus points if they can also put them back in!
- To complete this activity with a toddler, increase the complexity by using tools to remove the toys from the bowl.
- Gift Unwrapping: Wrap items (i.e. household items, small animals and characters, blocks, etc) in gift paper or packing paper. Tape the paper shut. Allow little one to practice removing items from the paper.
- Frozen toy rescue: Freeze toys within a bowl. Remove from freezer by heating external bowl under warm running water. Allow children to melt the items with water to retrieve their toys. This is also fun to use mini hammers or items to break apart the ice!
Montessori Based Sensory Activities
- Firstly, climb a ladder (with supervision of course)
- Turn off and on the lights within the home
- Outdoor play: Hit up a local park and enjoy climbing, jumping, sliding, spinning and touching everything.
- Help clean the home: Dust, move laundry between the hamper and washer, sweep.
- Push the laundry basket to the other room
- Finally, help within the kitchen:
- Clean and rinse dishes (water play)
- Dry dishes (learn to stack items and organize)
- Get involved in meal time (i.e. cut items with kitchen utensils, help to stir the pots on the stove, pour or scoop something for a recipe, feel / touch dough)
Outdoor Play
Outdoor play is another one of favorite sensory activities because it requires little to no prep!
- Nature Walk: Allow little one to explore by using all of their senses. I.E. touch the branches, roll around in the grass, find the worms. You name it – just let them be.
- Gardening and Landscaping: Whether this be digging the dirt, picking up stones, transferring items in a bucket or simply inspecting, gardening and landscaping can be a fun way to engage in sensory activities. As a bonus, incorporate water play like learning how to turn on and off the sprinkler.
- Bucket Collection: Use a bucket to collect treasures! Have this be endless – flowers, grass, leaves, insects. When you return home, review the items together utilizing all your senses (though, maybe not taste!).
Library Free Classes + Books
There are a variety of books with textures and various materials to encourage sensory play. The library often also has a section dedicated to these types of items as well.
We also encourage our daughter to participate within sensory activities at our local library and at child care centers. Our local library actually offers a series of sensory activities throughout the month ranging from music time, story time and sensory activities for toddlers. The benefit of these classes include:
- The classes are free!
- It encourages fun sensory activities we may not think about
- It builds social skills though imaginative sensory play with other children
- Finally, if the sensory activity is a ‘messy play’ day, we do not have a huge mess to clean up within our home
Mixed Bin
There are two different types of mixed bin activities we like to incorporate into play, dry bins and wet bins. Sensory bins encourage play through a variety of textures which can also be played with indoors or outdoors, in a water table or on sensory table. The ideas for sensory place activities for toddlers within a bin are endless (and are easy DIY activities with household items)!
- Dry Sensory Bins: A dry sensory bin does not include a liquid. Some of our favorite items for dry sensory bin activities include mixed textures (i.e. beans, dry pasta, lentils, quinoa, oatmeal, cereal). We have simply put these items together in a bin to allow for texture exploration as well as transferring items with a wooden spoon or into a muffin tin.
- To add extra color to these bins, try experimenting with adding paint to the items the night before the sensory activity. Add the ingredients into a bag, add paint (1-2 TBS at a time) and shake! Allow to sit on a parchment paper lined cookie sheet in a singular layer to dry completely before playing.
- Consider separating the items before play begins and allow your child to pour the items together. Give items like spoons or tongs to transfer the items between the bins.
- Wet Sensory Bins: A wet sensory bin includes something in the form or liquid (or goop). Our favorite items to include within wet sensory bin activities include
- Mystery Water: A fun sensory activity is making ‘mystery water’. Mystery water is made by combining water and corn starch together. Place household items, toys or anything that sinks into the water and it will magically ‘disappear’! If the water settles and the corn starch goes to the bottom of the container, simply stir and use again.
- Add food coloring for a fun twist!
- Mystery Water: A fun sensory activity is making ‘mystery water’. Mystery water is made by combining water and corn starch together. Place household items, toys or anything that sinks into the water and it will magically ‘disappear’! If the water settles and the corn starch goes to the bottom of the container, simply stir and use again.
What are your favorite sensory activities for toddlers? Share in the comments below!
