Baby Play: Sensory Tray With Cereal

Offer your little ones a new play experience using their senses to explore cereal. Using food in play at a young age is a great way to stimulate young children's senses with out the worry of having to be careful of what goes in their mouth. 

Our cereal was placed in a tuff spot but you could use a storage box or brand new cat litter tray. I love these tuff spots as they make it easy for babies to get in or to fit more older children around the tray. I have used cereal in play before when doing math games with little man and it turned out really well so this time I thought I would see how the babies would like it. 

Instead of just using dried cereal I added some cars. This would hopefully mean Tinnie would be less likely to eat them and it would help to slow introduce L to sensory materials which he can be nervous when using. The cars were also great for adding more opportunity for sound to the play as the cars roll over and crush the cereal. 

The children were able to use the cereal to :

• Develop their pincer grasp through picking up individual pieces of cereal
• Listen to the sounds the cereal made when dropped , pushed across the tray or crushed
• Look at the different shapes
• Older children could recognise the numbers and count the cereal when placing it in the trucks.
• Tasting different flavours and feeling different textures

Tinnie still ended up spending the whole time crawling around eating the cereal. Every thing goes in his mouth at the moment so this was no surprise really. L became more confident as the activity went on. He had great fun filling the trucks with the cereal and then emptying them again. 

Links to Development Matters:

Finding out and exploring

• Showing curiosity about objects, events and people

• Using senses to explore the world around them

• Engaging in open-ended activity

• Showing particular interests