Written by: Katibelle Dicker (Spring 2020)
If you are a caretaker of young children you are likely familiar with the popular trend of making slime and other DIY sensory activities. This may be in part due to the reported increase in concerns of children displaying sensory processing issues coming from parents and other professionals in the pediatric field (Hanscom, 2014). While at-home sensory activities are engaging and beneficial play for children, they can be costly, and time-consuming to put together. There is another option, a no-cost, even greater developmentally rich, and family-friendly alternative, and that is mother nature.
The Importance of Sensory Exposure on Early Childhood Development
When children enter the world, they begin trying to make sense of their environment, this is done through input to their five senses; sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. Sensory play also includes balance and bodily awareness or movement. Sensory play is a vital part of early childhood development because it builds nerve connections that act as pathways of communication in the brain, refines sensory thresholds, and improves physical, cognitive, social-emotional, and language development (Goodstart, 2016).
Sensory Processing Disorder (SPD)
More recently, professionals in early childcare settings have noticed an increase in sensory processing issues amongst children. Hanscom (2014) mentioned in her blog:
According to many teachers, children are frequently falling out of their seats in school, running into walls, tripping over their own feet, and unable to pay attention. School administrators are complaining that kids are getting more aggressive on the playgrounds… (para 5)
When children have SPD they may struggle to gauge their strength potentially turning harmless play into misinterpreted acts of aggression, experience underresponsiveness to touch which may cause a child to fall from their seat, or run into a wall, or become increasingly sensitive to sensory stimuli such as a button on their pants, which may become overly distracting from any form of learning (Berk & Meyers, 2016).
Ditching Sensory Bins and Getting Children Outside
Many parents and early childhood professionals have been proactive towards this issue by encouraging sensory play at home, in the classrooms, and inside the clinics. Typical sensory play involves shaving cream, kinetic sand, textured balance beams, tables filled with assorted materials, etc., but often overlooked is the most sensory-rich environment that we have to offer… the outdoors! While there are plenty of ways to mimic sensory experiences inside the home, none of them comes close to the amount of sensory input that is provided in nature. The outdoors are filled with colors of all shades, objects of varying textures, sounds of different wildlife, smells of plants and trees, and more that simply cannot be replicated indoors.
Getting Families Involved
For the families of young children, there is a great opportunity and need to bring children out into nature to explore and investigate the world around them. Taking children camping to explore the different tactile objects such as pine cones, or fallen leaves around the campsite while smelling the juniper trees and hearing the birds chirp is a great sensory experience for a little one, not to mention an enjoyable getaway for the whole family. Having children helping out in the garden in the backyard gives them visual input from the bright colored flowers, acoustic input from the sounds of the lawnmower, and tactile input from the different potting soils used.
Nature can be exceedingly beneficial when it comes to sensory development, but there are also plenty of additional developmental areas that can be addressed and improved outdoors. By having a child go for a hike they are working on their cognitive development using problem-solving skills to assess which rock is stable enough to walk on and which rock looks dangerous, they are working on their physical development by balancing on narrowing paths or safely moving from one side of a stream to the other (Hanscom, 2014). Social-emotional skills are developed as the child shows a sense of independence and ability to adapt to a new environment, and language development increases as children identify unfamiliar objects and wildlife, expanding their vocabulary (Dodge, Colker & Heroman, 2008).
In addition to all that developmental growth, nature provides a great opportunity to teach children to engage in mindfulness, focusing on the present with a lack of judgment (Goodstart, 2016). Other benefits to outdoor play are the money that will be saved on Elmer’s glue and baking soda, healthy outdoor habits that children will develop early on, as well as the opportunity for positive interactions between the familial unit during family-friendly activities.
Outdoor play provides a multitude of sensory-rich experiences, a crucial aspect to each area of early childhood development, and with the increasing number of children presenting signs of SPD, it is time to step outside and allow mother nature to step in.
References
Berk, L. E., & Meyers, A. B. (2016). Infants and children: Prenatal through middle childhood (8th Ed.). Upper Saddle River, N.J: Pearson/Merrill Prentice Hall.
Dodge, D. T., Colker, L. J., & Heroman, C. (2008). The creative curriculum for preschool: College edition. Washington, D.C.: Teaching Strategies
Goodstart Early Learning. (2016). Exploring the benefits of sensory play. Retrieved from
https://www.goodstart.org.au/news-and-advice/october-2016/exploring-the-benefits-of-sensory-play
Hanscom, A. (2014). NATURE IS THE ULTIMATE SENSORY EXPERIENCE: A Pediatric Occupational Therapist Makes the Case for Nature Therapy. Retrieved from
https://www.childrenandnature.org/2014/05/12/nature-is-the-ultimate-sensory-experience-pediatric-occupational-therapist-makes-the-case-for-nature-therapy/