The Power of Play Dough & Sensory Play
If so, please read on……..
Play dough sensory ‘play’ supports children’s learning and development in many ways. Engagement with a significant adult or peers and/or purposeful loose parts enhances the benefits of play dough sensory play even further.
The following are areas that provide remarkable key benefits from play dough sensory play.
LANGUAGE AND LITERACY DEVELOPMENT: Playing with play dough encourages oral language development and communication skills. Children practice listening to and talking with others. They expand and build upon their vocabulary and extend their ability to communicate their thoughts and ideas effectively.
COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT: As children play with play dough and loose parts they are promoting cognitive growth and brain development. Research shows that sensory play builds nerve connections in the brain’s pathways, building stronger neural pathway supporting memory, thinking and processing abilities. It supports sensory processing. It increases children’s attention span and concentration. Cognitive development is the knowledge, skills, problem solving and dispositions, which help children to think about and understand the world around them.
SOCIAL AND EMOTIONAL DEVELOPMENT: Using play dough with an adult, friends, or siblings presents opportunities for practising the skills of sharing, collaborating and negotiating.
There is no right or wrong way to play with play dough allowing children to feel competent and proud of their accomplishments. Playing with play dough is calming and therapeutic. It allows children to relieve stress through their hands and receive comfort from the texture and scent of the dough. It can also help children cope with big feelings in a safe and calming way developing the capacity to self regulate their emotions. It builds confidence and self-esteem, resilience, persistence and patience. In their experimenting, children come up with their own ideas, satisfy their curiosity, and analyze and solve problems in a non-intrusive, no pressure situation.
FINE MOTOR DEVELOPMENT: Children gain strength and improve dexterity in their fingers, hands and wrists building fine motor development as they roll, poke, squish and squeeze play dough. Improving fine motor strength is critical for physical development preparing children for activities such as writing, drawing, cutting and self-help skills.
HAND-EYE COORDINATION: As children use their hands to shape and manipulate play dough they are developing their ability to match hand movement with eye movement. The use of play dough tools such as stamps, children can further develop this skill as they line up the stamp to press into the dough.
SCIENTIFIC AND MATHEMATICAL CONCEPTUAL UNDERSTANDINGS: Children learn about science through hands-on experiences as provided by engagement with play dough. They learn by observing, thinking, and talking about how materials feel and how they change.
As children are shaping play dough, they are also learning about cause and effect.
They compare and contrast objects (“Mine’s a fat pancake and yours is skinny”), actions (“No, don’t cut it! Scrape it, like this”), and experiences (“We’re not making a snake—we’re making a road”).
Play dough play encourages and provides many opportunities to explore mathematical concepts and thinking. Children explore shape and size and the concepts of ‘more’ or ‘less’.
They practice counting, learn about shapes (geometry) and how they relate to each other (spatial sense), and practice sorting and classifying. Such mathematical ways of thinking prepare children for learning more complex math concepts in the coming years.
CREATIVITY AND IMAGINATION: Young children express their ideas through art and make-believe play. Play dough encourages children to use symbolic thinking. Play dough can be anything they want it to be. This is an important part of cognitive development and how children learn to express their ideas.
‘Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world’ Albert Einstein
LEARNING THROUGH THE SENSES: There are seven senses. Sight, smell, taste, touch, hearing, proprioception (body position) and Vestibular (movement). Most people are familiar with the first five, however proprioception which is the body awareness sense and vestibular which is the movement and balance sense are equally as important.
It has been noted that learning that engages as many of the senses as possible increases the chances that concepts learned will be retained.
Whilst children are playing with our sensory kits the tactile (touch) sense helps them manipulate the contents of the kit and explore the myraid of textures. The vestibular (balance and movement) sense enables them to stay upright whilst playing and be able to manipulate their body parts to explore during play. Proprioception (body position) helps them to know/learn/explore how to hold the materials, how much force to use, which fingers to use at the same time or independent of each other. Auditory (hearing) sense enables communication with others to be heard, the noise of objects to be processed/made/repeated. Vision (sight) is engaged through the many colours in the kit, the connection of visual engagement between the loose parts, coloured dough. Olfactory (smell) is ignited through our delciously scented dough and can engage connections with smells from other experiences and last but not least, whilst eating our dough is not recommended, if it does happen to enter curious little mouths the sensory explosion of salty dough will be ignited!
LOOSE PARTS AND PLAY DOUGH: Adding other elements to play dough enhances the learning and development in all of the areas mentioned above. Children have the opportunity to wonder, experiment, create, explore and create based on their ideas and understandings with endless possibilities.
So what are you waiting for?The little people in your life NEED one of kits just as much as they WANT them!
