Sensory Play includes any activity that stimulates your young child’s senses: touch, smell, taste, movement, balance, sight and hearing.

Sensory activities facilitate exploration and naturally encourage children to use scientific processes while they play, create, investigate and explore.

The sensory activities allow children to refine their thresholds for different sensory information helping their brain to create stronger connections to process and respond to sensory information.

As part of our Planet’s week, we decided to create the surface of Mars.

With some pasta, red sand, and kidney beans, we learned about the composition of the soil on Mars, and then we made it!

Scientists have long thought that massive planets like Neptune and Uranus which contain relatively tiny rocky cores covered with a mantle of slurried water, ammonia, and methane ices and surrounded by a thick atmosphere—are subject to rain made with literal diamonds.

Now researchers have synthesized the process in a lab, showing how such conditions might occur. Their results support this idea.

To recreate this process in our class, we created our very own Neptune s with glass beads and play dough. In our classroom, we love to play with play dough because it has so many developmental benefits!

For one, improves fine motor skills as students manipulate the dough. Secondly, it encourages divergent thinking as students build their own creations. Lastly, it builds creativity, as students use their imaginations!

Although the concept of planet order is an abstract one for young learners to understand, the ability to sequence objects is not.

For this activity, we placed the eight planets in order, starting with the sun. To learn the names of each planet, we sang a song during circle time that we practiced every day for a week.

We sang to the tune of Skip to My Lou, and the lyrics involved the words: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars. Jupiter, Saturn, among the stars.

Uranus, and Neptune, too. Spin around the sun it’s true. Spinning, spinning around the sun. Spinning, spinning, everyone.

The Earth is ours, it’s number three. It’s atmosphere is right for me. In addition to this, we created planet Earths out of play dough and played various games during circle time, where each student took turns being the sun, and the planets that rotated around him/her. It was definitely a week of fun and learning!

Whens somebody mentions construction play, you may think of children being creative. Designing their own structures. Making something new.

That sort of play is beneficial and exciting for development.

It is known among child development professionals that block play may foster a wide range of abilities, including motor skills, spatial skills, language skills, and divergent thinking.

But not all play is free-wheeling. There is another way to have fun with construction toys, and it might help children develop a special package of skills.

It is called structured block play, and it’s what happens when children try to recreate a construction by consulting a model or blueprint. Kids must analyze what they see, perceive the parts that make up the whole, and figure out how the parts relate to each other.

To be really successful, kids also need to think quantitatively, and be able to rotate geometric shapes in the mind’s eye. To apply these STEM skills to our week of rockets, we created rockets out of a variety of materials.

We began with silver-painted Legos, moved on with silver painted cardboard tubes, and finished with creating rockets out of silver Styrofoam.Before creating this magnificent machines, we looked at several pictures of rockets (primarily those used by NASA).

Some of these included the Improved Orion, the Black Bryant VB/VC, the Terrier-Malemute, and the Terrier-Oriole. We also learned about how rockets take off in stages. Lastly, we looked at various blueprints of the different machines, making whichever one we wanted to. This was a week-long project, as we experimented with different materials.

During our week of “stars”, we learned all about constellations.

We made them with a variety of materials, we played gross motor games aimed at teaching the major constellations (such as Orion and Andromeda), and finally, we used play dough!

For this activity, students added confetti stars to black play dough.

They then used plastic knives to cut their dough into a variety of shapes.

Following this, they named their constellation.

Finally, students compared their names (most of which were silly) to their friends!