Table Time Activity: Five Senses Sorting
Skill Check
This activity focuses on tacting common objects, body part recognition and answering “WH” questions.
Growing My Skills
Gather a variety of household items and place them in a bag.
Use five baskets, cookie sheets, bags (follow the link for example), and label with the five senses.
Let child reach into the bag of items and identify what the item is, what you do with it, and place it with the correct sense.
Modification – Complete activity with only 2-3 senses at a time.
Floortime Play Activity: Music Time!
Skill Check
This activity focuses on our sense of hearing! Just be silly and have fun during this activity and make all the noises you possibly can! Keep it very open-ended and work on engaging your child in play!
Growing My Skills
Some ideas to add to floortime play: Label “loud,” sounds versus “quiet” sounds while you are exploring sounds with instruments.
Expand your child’s ability to use the materials functionally.
Show them how to use the materials and then ask them to try!
If you are wanting to support their ability to request “more,” of something- use the instrument and then suddenly stop and give your child wait periods so they can reinitiate!
Help your child reinitiate by modeling “more!”
Relaxation Time Activity: Halloween Music: Identifying Different Kinds of Music (spooky, slow, fast, bedtime song, etc.)
Skill Check
The goal of this activity is to help teach your child relaxation and engagement skills. While also exploring their hearing senses.
Growing My Skills
Gather materials.
Ask your child about their senses (where is your nose, mouth, ears, hands/fingers, etc.)
Ask your child if they can smell anything (model sniffing with your nose) ask your child if they can hear anything (model touching/listening with your ear, etc.)
Ask questions to connect the activity and your child’s senses What do you hear? How does it make you feel? How does this song make your body feel?
Creative Time Activity: 5 Sense Collage
Skill Check
The goal of this activity is to encourage your child’s creativity and help them connect with the 5 senses they have been learning about all week. This activity can also introduce your child to preferences and fine motor skills!
Growing My Skills
Gather materials.
Ask your child about their senses (where is your nose, mouth, ears, hands/fingers, etc.)
Ask your child if they can smell anything (model sniffing with your nose) ask your child if they can hear anything (model touching/listening with your ear, etc.)
Help your child pick out items/pictures that represent different “senses” (please see Pinterest link for ideas.)
Help your child label each sense on paper.
Help your child glue on each item or picture to each correlating sense.
Talk about how each item feels and how it correlates with each sense!
Movement Time Activity: Tactile Bins
Skill Check
The goal of this week is to explore in sensory bins while holding different play positions to work on posturing.
Growing My Skills
Allow your child some time to just explore in different sensory bins; you can talk about what they see, hear, smell, and feel.
You can hide small toys in the bins, or provide measuring cups to work on scooping/dumping.
With the bins on the floor, position them on their bellies.
With the bins on an elevated surface, they can tall kneel (kneeling on both knees with their bottom-up and not back resting on their feet).
With the bins on the floor, have them side-sit (sitting on their bottom with their legs flexed out to the same side).
With the bins on the floor, have them in four-point (crawling position on hands and knees).
Mealtime Activity: Fruit Group Identification
Skill Check
The goal of this activity is to use your child’s sense of sight to identify foods based on color and appearance.
Growing My Skills
Wash hands and ask the child to select a food based on its color, texture, or appearance.
Example: “What food is bumpy?” “Which food is red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple?” “Which food is long, short, round, square?”
Language Time Activity: Activities For Each Sense
Skill Check
The goal of this week is to dive deeper into each sense, and figure out how we use our body parts to see, taste, smell, touch, and hear. We can expand our vocabulary by labeling tastes as sweet, sour, or salty. We can identify sounds as loud or quiet. Or feel items that are rough, bumpy, soft, or smooth.
Growing My Skills
Sight – See how different objects make different sounds. Do paper clips sound different than dried pasta or pom poms?
Smell – Open up your spices and see how different spices have different smells. If you have essential oils, you can smell those. Or see what other items around the house have scents, such as lotions, soaps, shampoo, perfumes, etc.
Touch – Trace your hand and cut it out. On each finger, glue 5 different items (pom poms, tape, sandpaper, uncooked pasta, rocks/pebbles) and describe how each one feels (bumpy, smooth, rough, soft, hard).
Taste – Do a blindfolded taste.
