Ellie’s Nana and Papa got her a sandbox for her birthday that she is pretty smitten with. Every day she crawls over to it, climbs inside and swirls her little legs around, grabbing handfuls of sand and flinging them everywhere. She’s actively exploring with all of her senses these days and so I thought it was high time we got around to doing more sensory types of play. I put on my preschool teacher hat and surfed pinterest for some inspiration and thought we would start simply with rice. A different texture and look than sand but similar in how you play with it.

I put just a little bit in a plastic storage tub and she immediately went right over, climbed in and helped herself to sensory exploration!

I wanted her to first experience the rice with just her hands but then gave her a measuring cup. She used that pincher grasp and was picking up bunches of rice and placing them into her cup! Then she would dump the cup haphazardly and start over again.

We had a playdate with some of my wonderful Mama friends and their little ones and we thought we would start these sensory playdates once a week, allowing the children to explore a new material. This week we introduced them to homemade playdoh. They weren’t too impressed (we thought they may be too young for playdoh but wanted to try anyway).

The adults seemed to enjoy squishing the playdoh far more than our littles did, but that was okay, because I happened to also bring the bin of rice. This turned out to be a bigger hit.

I colored half of it with food dye to give it a more “pinteresty” look.  Ellie and her friends enjoyed exploring the rice for quite some time.

All in all, I would say a very successful sensory play date! We’ll bring that playdoh out when they’re a bit older.