So what exactly is Baby Sensory Play? By definition, any activity that stimulates any of the five senses through play. These activities are designed to stimulate baby’s touch, smell, taste, sight or hearing and can be introduced from birth. The idea of Baby Sensory Play is that babies will begin to explore and discover through their five different senses which has many benefits for their development.
Baby Sensory Toys are designed to offer families an easy and fun route into engaging all of babies five senses, and that’s where we come in. While we all know that interacting with our babies, showing them new things, places and people works wonders for their learning and development, Baby Sensory Play particularly serves to home-in on all those things that will give your baby the best start in life.
So if you’re wondering, here’s how…
How Sensory Play will benefit your baby
1 - Brain Development
Research shows that early stimulation in babies contributes to brain development gains. There is an outdated theory that babies should be left to develop without any extra stimulation, but studies show that the development of our brain, sensory perception and motor skills happen in sync and that even the smallest babies must be challenged and stimulated at their level from birth onwards.
While it’s important not to try and rush the process of development and instead support baby’s natural development, by stimulating and encouraging them from an early age to use different parts of their brain, we can contribute to healthy and important brain development. We have created our Baby Sensory Flashcards with your baby's brain development in mind, follow the latest research to develop your baby's brain through stimulating, engaging images.
2 - Awareness and alertness
Babies who are exposed to multi-sensory stimulation through toys and activities will develop more awareness and alertness which is great news for your journey to reaching those exciting milestones. Research has shown that stimulating baby’s five senses sends signals to the brain that strengthen the neural processes promoting cognitive, social and emotional benefits. In turn, these developments encourage an increased alertness in babies. Our Baby Sensory Flashcards not only capture your baby's attention to develop their awareness, but help to develop their alertness by containing high contrast images that attract their retina's to follow the flashcards left-right and up-down.
3 - Cognitive skills
Cognitive skills are the core skills your brain uses to think, solve problems, create novel ideas from current ideas, read, learn, remember, reason, pay attention and much more. Babies can actually begin to build on their cognitive skills straight away. They can do this through the exploration of their five senses. Findings suggest that through sensory play and experiences, babies store their whole body experiences in their ‘sensory memory’. We use our sensory memory to begin the process of understanding and gaining knowledge.
Sensory play, particularly through sensory toys, can offer spacial awareness and pattern recognition, which are two things that will help your baby to build those cognitive skills.
4 - Language skills
Baby Sensory Play gives babies the opportunity for expression early on. This type of expression has been shown to have a positive impact on the language development of young children. Research shows that Baby Sensory Play and stimulation in babies has been demonstrated to improve the fine motor and language skills of a child at age 2 or 3. This shows the long-lasting effects which can benefit your child into pre-school age.
5 - Comforting and calming
Baby Sensory Play will be a calming and comforting bonding activity for both you and your baby. There is no doubt that your baby will love all of the exciting new sounds and different feels, but baby sensory can even help you to establish a night-time routine. You will be surprised just how quickly babies can start to associate and learn the difference between day and night. By choosing appropriate sensory play for the day and calmer sensory choices for the evening could help your baby distinguish night-time more easily. One perspective is tuning the different senses slightly to encourage better sleeping habits. For example, soothing music for gentle hearing and swaying motions for easy and calming visualisation could be a good place to start. We have also been told by many customers, that our Baby Sensory Flashcards are great to calm babies, as their focus and attention has diverted to the fun, interesting and engaging high contrast images on each Sensory Flashcard.
The biggest benefit to parents is knowing our babies are content and developing at a comfortable speed. Sensory Play is an easy activity to incorporate into your everyday routine, can be done anywhere and will give you peace of mind that your bonding time is leading to greater discoveries and exciting developments and milestones for your little one.
Enjoy!
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