Sensory Sand Slime (Say that fast 10 times!)

Sticky, slippery, gooey, heavy, bumpy...that's what sensory experiences are made of.  Did you know that learning and retention improve depending upon how many of our senses are engaged?

What would be more fun then super stretching sand? Here is another fun way we played with sand in our class:

Sand Slime Recipe

• 2 bottles of school glue (any kind will work)
• Play Sand (Traditional or colored works great)
• 1 cup of liquid starch

Firstly, checking it out...

Warming it up by touching and stretching it...

A little more stretching and shaping...

And now with a friend's help...

And then so many friends, stretching, pulling and shaping, almost across the whole classroom!  

Sensory Experiences in Kitah Alef and Kitah Bet

Sensory experiences are very important during the preschool years.  The children enjoy exploring anything in the sensory bins with their hands, fingers, and sense of smell. In the spirit of winter and winter weather, one of the sensory bins was filled with pillow stuffing, golf balls, and scoopers (snow?). The children pulled the stuffing apart, rolled it into balls, and scooped the balls out of the bins.

The children were also introduced to Cloud Dough, which is flour and baby oil mixed together. Some of the children thought that is was sand. They used various scoopers to play with the Cloud Dough. They smiled and laughed as they scooped the dough!

The children continued to gravitate to the bins over and over throughout the day!

As infants and toddlers, there is limited of language or the world around. The best input from the outside world to the brain is through the senses. They are nature’s first learning tools, and are imperative for the brain to develop properly.

Rough, smooth, silky, scratch, bumpy, and other textures; colors, shapes, cold, warmth, scents and more all provide input to that growing brain. With these sensory interactions, the brain  recognizes patterns, sounds, and puts it together into sequences and patterns that build more complex synapses in the brain, thereby enabling that child to learn, remember, recognize, etc.

This is a most positive experience for young children and in fact creates the right "brain space" to learn forever!