Before going into the details of it, you first need to understand the sensory activities that are important for children. Known also as Sensory Play. These are meant to hone and stimulate the most important senses of the children: sight, hearing and touch.

These allow the children to come to terms with their surroundings and react accordingly. The reason Sensory activities/sensory play is so famous in societal circles is due to its playful nature. Thanks to these, children learn to cope with their surroundings, through sports and games instead of being bound to a room.

Now this was designed keeping in mind the “fun” aspect, but do our little ones really enjoy it? 

THEY LOVE THE GAME PART OF IT

One of the easiest ways to develop a child’s motor skills includes games and sports. These are not the sport we as adults are familiar with, but ones that are less “taxing”. These include different kinds of painting, playing with blocks and kinetic sand, running through a mini obstacle course etc.

Being part of their leisure too, children tend to enjoy these activities. This is a win-win situation as parents and teachers can too gauge the level of development of their child. So, through these, children don’t just have fun, they even hone their senses to better adapt to the environment around them.

Also, when they use their cognition, observation and resulting behavior to finish the game, the sense of success after completion is also a feeling they love.

THEY MIGHT FIND IT DIFFICULT TO GAIN NEW SKILLS

We need to understand that such activities are targeted towards smaller children like toddlers or preschoolers or kindergarteners. So, they need to be taught basic life skills too as a result sensory development isn’t always fun and games and probably this is the part where children tend to get a little cranky.

Eg. A child may not know how to use the spoon or fork, as s/he is habituated to messily eat with their hands. In such a case, making the transition becomes really tough for their small brains to process. Thus, they might protest, cry or unwillingly do the work.
A similar example is a child who has developed good motor skills but still needs work on activities like putting alphabets/numbers in order etc. That task would be excruciatingly difficult for the child.

Couple that with the adults forcing them to do that work, the child tends to become even more unwilling to do so. However, no matter how much they suffer initially, perfecting these skills will eventually benefit them the most, and they’ll be happy about it.

THEY LOVE THE EXPLORATION PART

This can be considered to be an extension of the previous point. As mentioned before, children might fuss about the difficulties in doing the task, but once they succeed, the pride of developing another skill is unparalleled for them.

Additionally, there are so many little discoveries that children make in this stage. The mixing of colours or the sounds made by different objects and instruments, fitting small jigsaw pieces to discover the bigger picture etc are what fascinate as well as encourage the children. Receiving compliments and positive reinforcements (eg. Snacks, toys etc) only increase their appetite to explore more.

Thus, learning new things on their own, while also having a good time, is what makes these children love sensory play.

SOMETIMES IT MIGHT BE A LITTLE TOO MUCH FOR THEM

We often see children crying and running out of day care centers or not willing to go there. It’s understandable because many a times, sensory play can be a bit overloading on these small children.

One of the reasons is that many institutions do not have a proper plan of action when it comes to approaching the children with sensory activities. Thus, they end up making children do activities for hours with little to no breaks. Also, the main purpose of these activities is to take the children out and make them learn new skills while being in a real life environment. But schools often tend to create artificial playing rooms. They need to understand that toys and materialistic things aren’t all that they need.

This after a point of time becomes repetitive and children start doing thse as chores instead of enjoying it.
Eg. Building blocks, abacus, drawing etc become mere tasks that the teacher has asked to complete, instead of being avenues to explore and learn new things.
Thus, what we need to understand that Sensory Activities/Sensory Play is still a good idea. Children still tend to learn with a smile on their face. However, today’s fast paced world and increased competition has made these activities into a brownie point collecting chore i.e children are taught these to become better than others and thus in life. Instead his should be a simple learning and stimulating experience