Sensational Sensory Art

Education
 21 Feb 2023

Activities that engage the seven senses and promote learning.

BY BONNIE LAXTON-BLINKHORN, KINDICARE

FEBRUARY 21, 2022

If you’ve ever stopped to watch your toddler investigate a new object, you’ll have witnessed the magic of sensory play.  

Whether it’s a silky scarf, a wooden block or a smooth pebble, children will use all their senses to explore the texture, shape, weight and taste of an object to learn all about it.   

Sensory exploration enables children to discover and understand the world around them through directly experiencing it with their body.  

Through handling both a pebble and a wooden block, children learn the differences and similarities between objects and eventually how to sort and classify them.      

These skills are the building blocks for literacy and numeracy, and activities which provide children with the chance to engage a variety of senses offer rich opportunities for learning and support cognitive development.    

As children grow up, their sensory interactions with the world become more sophisticated and they learn words to describe all the things they can see, hear, touch, taste and smell.  

These experiences provide children with a library of useful information they can draw on to enable them to appropriately respond to the variety of external stimuli they encounter in daily life.   

This means the more opportunities a child has to engage in sensory play the more developed their sensory integration will be 

Art activities are a truly effective way for children to learn through their senses and messy projects are especially fun over the warm summer months when they can be done outside.   

Here are five ideas to get you started:  

Ice Cream Dough  

Employing the senses of touch, sight, smell and (maybe) taste this ice cream dough offers a host of opportunities for sensory learning.  

Made from a cup each of salt, water and flour, along with a bit of cornflour (for a smooth texture), and food colouring, this luscious creamy dough looks just like scoopy ice cream and is safe for babies.  Use cones and sprinkles for texture and crunch and a real ice cream parlour vibe.  

Children can be involved in mixing up the dough and choosing the colours and the good news is this lovely pastel coloured ‘ice cream’ can be bagged and stored in the fridge for use later. 

Water Bead Sensory Bags

Water beads are tiny polymer balls which come in a variety of colours and expand to about 100 times their original size when submerged in water. While they aren’t safe for babies when loose, they can be securely taped into zip lock bags for lots of rainbow coloured fun.  

When hydrated water beads have a wonderful jelly-like consistency and a lovely translucency, which makes them irresistible to children.  

Toddlers will adore squishing their sensory bags and shaking them up and watching the balls settle back in a heap. Older children will enjoy running the balls through their fingers, stepping on them and scooping, tipping and pouring them, just like sand.   

Edible Water Bead Play with Dyed Tapioca  

Tapioca balls are readily available at supermarkets and just need to be soaked in water for five minutes to make them soft and ready for play. Unlike the polymer beads above, this activity is suitable for very young children as tapioca is safe for small mouths.   


To make colourful balls, rehydrate, separate into containers and submerge them in water and the food colouring of your choice. To make the colours really vibrant the tapioca will need a few hours to soak, so think about doing this the night before.   

Once the balls are colourful add them to buckets and basins with a safe amount of water in the bottom.  

The balls will float, providing children with an opportunity to poke them, pour them, stir them and tip them. The balls feel slimy and sticky at the same time and are the perfect size for little fingers.   

Making Nests with Real Clay  

Real clay is much denser than playdough and requires a fair amount of strength to roll and shape, but it has a lovely texture and can be dried in the sun.  

Nests are an easy shape for tiny fingers to form and can be filled with straw, twigs, leaves and hand-made eggs. Nest-dwelling animals, such as birds can also be added to the mix.  

To make a nest, children will need a ball of dough, which they can manipulate into a bowl shape using their thumbs. The size can vary, depending on whether you are making a nest for dinosaurs or sparrows!  

Painting Balloons  

Children and balloons go together, they just do, and balloon painting gives toddlers a whole new way to experience these lovely rubbery orbs.  

Balloons are smooth and squeaky and not all paints will work on them, so balloon painting offers children a great opportunity to experiment, and problem solve, it also engages a variety of senses.  

Balloons can be taped to a wall or left bobbing around on the art table, children can dip their balloons into saucers of paint and use them as brushes or use their hands and cover the balloons in paint that way.  

Weighted helium balloons offer a different experience as children will need to angle their paint upwards. 

The seven sensory systems 

Humans experience the world via seven senses, the first five: sight, sound, smell, taste and touch are well known. The last two are vestibular, which relates to movement and balance and provides information about where we are in space, and proprioception, which tells us where our body parts are relative to each other and how much force is needed to complete a task.   

Activities that engage all your child’s senses through hands on learning offer them the greatest chance to use their own cognitive processes to interpret experiences, understand the world and retain information.  

For more play inspiration check out our Fun Play Food Ideas. 

The sensory art ideas and pictures included in this article are reproduced with the kind permission of Meri Cherry