Sensory Pirates!

I LOVE play and sensory play is my favourite way to make connections and open up the world to children.

When we talk about senses, we often consider the usual ones such as touch and sound, but remembering smell and sight are just as important.

We have had a pirate theme for a few weeks, and I have been encouraging children to engage in some sensory play in order to meet their maths objectives (filling and emptying, quantity and capacity, finding differences and similarities and matching number and numeral and coin recognition). I wanted to share with you some of the activities that we have been setting up to provide some inspiration. We added ‘salt spray’ scent to the water, so that the children could get an idea of what the sea smells like. Lots of different textures to explore and real items (money!) that the children can touch and smell. Have some fans available so that the children can feel the wind and provide varied textures such as dry, damp and very soggy sand!

Everything we used we found around school, and so you don't need to much specialist kit to set up some sensory play scenarios.