Feel & grasp
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By
Melanie A.
Feel and grasp: How wooden toys promote children's sensory development
Seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling and tasting: Perception through our five senses is the basis on which we experience and understand the world. A child's sensory development begins in the womb and really picks up speed in the first year after birth.
What does sensory development involve and how can parents encourage it? You can find answers to these exciting questions in the following article.
What is sensory development and why is it so important for children?
The term sensory describes perception via the five senses and the interpretation of the stimuli received in this way. This means that sensory development is of great importance in childhood. Without sensory skills, it is impossible for us to understand our environment and react flexibly to it.
Sensory development in babies and toddlers: A definition
Babies have sensory abilities from birth. For example, they react to sounds and recognize their mother's smell. Their sense of touch is also in the middle of its development. Only vision is still clearly limited in newborns.
During the first year of life, sensory abilities continue to develop. By the age of one, infants can already distinguish between numerous sounds, prefer or reject certain smells, taste a variety of flavors, feel different textures and roughly estimate distances.
The importance of sensory development in children
Children's sensory development, which of course continues after the end of the first year of life, determines the further course of the child's overall development. Logically, after all, it is through the senses that children - and adults too, of course - perceive and understand the world around them. Sensory perception in children influences the later development of cognitive, motor and social skills and is therefore quite rightly the focus of early child development. Sensory perception is therefore the basis for learning processes that continue throughout childhood.
What are the benefits of wooden toys for children's perceptual development?
You can optimally support the development of sensory skills with our high-quality Eichhorn wooden toys. Because the natural raw material wood offers your child an enormously rich sensory play experience. You can see this for yourself if you take the time to focus your senses on a wooden toy. You will notice that the natural material has a very special feel and provides you with remarkably clear sensory feedback via the sense of touch due to its own weight. In comparison, plastic toys are light and have a very smooth surface, which is rather uninteresting in terms of sensory feedback. So if you want to encourage your child's sense of touch, wooden toys are an excellent choice.
In addition to the many sensory experiences that wooden toys give your child, they also have a whole range of other advantages. They are extremely robust and have an above-average service life, are completely harmless to health and are also sustainable. This makes them a product that you can choose with a clear conscience in every respect.
Tips for parents: Promoting sensory development at home
As a parent, you can encourage the absorption, processing and networking of sensory impressions, also known as sensory integration, at home. This is particularly effective with toys that confront your child with several sensory impressions at the same time. A good example of this is our Eichhorn outdoor toy. This usually gets kids moving, invites them to touch and try things out and is used outdoors, where the environment offers numerous visual impressions, sounds and smells. Below we would like to give you some practical tips on how to promote children's sensory integration through play.
Encouraging the sense of touch: games with different surfaces and materials
First, let's look at how you can explain the sense of touch to your child and give them valuable tactile experiences.
Games that focus on touching surfaces, textures and shapes are ideal here. For example, ask your child to close their eyes while you give them Eichhorn wooden building blocks of different shapes. Can they recognize the shapes with their hands without looking? You can let your child explore different textures and surface finishes in the same way. You can use these materials from the nursery, nature and household for this:
- Plastic box
- Tea towel
- Rubber glove
- dishwashing sponge
- Foam rubber
- Bubble wrap
- Cling film
- baking paper
- Plasticine
- Soft toy
- leaves
- Pine cones
- Potting soil
- water
- ice cubes
While your child explores the objects, deepen the sensory experience by asking specific questions about perception. Is the surface soft or hard? Is the object smooth or rough? Does it feel warm or cold? As their sensory development progresses, your child will be able to recognize and name increasingly subtle nuances between these opposites.
Recognize sounds: Games to promote auditory perception
You can support sensory development in terms of hearing just as playfully and with just as little effort.
Use sound games and instruments and supplement your selection of sounds with household objects such as crackling aluminum foil, wooden cooking spoons hitting against each other or rattling metal pot lids. Again, it is your child's job to find out which sound they are hearing with their eyes closed.
You can also offer your child our Eichhorn music toy, which they can use to create different sounds themselves and sharpen their auditory perception. With very simple musical toys, such as rattles from Eichhorn, even toddlers can enjoy such valuable sensory experiences.
Discovering colors and shapes: Visual and cognitive stimulation activities
In the first few years of life, children's sensory development goes hand in hand with their cognitive development. You can also encourage this through play. Play ideas that combine visual perception with the cognitive understanding of certain content, such as recognizing and naming colors and shapes, are sometimes suitable for this purpose.
In our children's & baby toys category, you will find all kinds of high-quality wooden toys that provide interesting visual and tactile stimuli thanks to their varied colors and shapes. For example, ask your child to point to red, green or blue toy components or ask them to look out for a round or square element.
You can incorporate small cognitive and sensory stimulation prompts like these naturally into normal play.
The best wooden toys to support children's sensory development
Children spend a lot of time playing every day. If you consciously choose toys that promote sensory development, you will give this time a supportive character. Below we would like to introduce you to some wooden toys from our Eichhorn online store that promote sensory development:
Promotion of tactile perception and fine motor skills
The promotion of tactile perception is closely linked to fine motor skills. Babies and toddlers benefit in this respect from Eichhorn teething rings and grasping toys, which they can safely grasp and explore with their little hands and mouth. Toddlers from the age of one, on the other hand, like to play with motor activity toys that offer them age-appropriate tactile sensations and present them with small motor challenges.
Among our construction toys, you will also find sensory stimulating toys for children of different ages. Toddlers can put their motor skills to the test with building blocks and gain lots of tactile and visual experiences. Older children are more enthusiastic about more challenging wooden building sets and construction sets for concentrated building.
Strengthening hand-eye coordination and problem-solving skills
Hand-eye coordination is based on visual perception and, in combination, enables the ability to develop solutions to a wide variety of problems. You can stimulate these processes by offering your child wooden puzzles. When doing the puzzle, they can perceive the shapes of the pieces with their eyes, think cognitively about which pieces belong where and finally use their hands to place them there.
Promotion of visual and kinaesthetic perception
Sensory development also includes the training of kinaesthetic perception, i.e. gaining an understanding of movements and the associated sensations. Babies and toddlers can have wonderful first experiences in this area with play arches and mobiles from Eichhorn. The moving elements of these toys provide varied visual stimuli and invite attentive observation. Slightly older children strengthen their visual and spatial perception by playing with marble runs. After all, following the path of the balls through the track creates exciting visual impressions that contribute to the development of kinaesthetic skills.
Stimulation of the sense of hearing and rhythmic abilities
You can practically combine the training of the sense of hearing with the promotion of a sense of rhythm. Our musical toys, which include drums and xylophones, encourage your child to try their hand at music and listen very carefully. Your child literally sets the tone with the drums and gradually develops a finer sense of rhythm and harmony.
Strengthening the sensory system through movement
Last but not least, physical movement is also an important part of promoting sensory development in children. With Eichhorn baby walkers, you can help your little ones to develop sensory mobility in a safe and age-appropriate way. From gripping the handle to maneuvering the vehicle through the environment to the sounds it makes, movement with a baby walker is accompanied by a number of sensory impressions.
Advanced explorers can boost their sensory development with our outdoor toys. The active adventures, whether on swings, rope ladders or croquet sets, offer a variety of sensory stimulation - including fresh air! - including fresh air!
Strengthen sensory development with Eichhorn toys
Sensory development is directly linked to the ability to learn and the acquisition of basic motor, social and cognitive skills. For this reason, it plays a particularly important role in child development. Our wooden toys from Eichhorn enable children to gain a wide range of sensory experiences in a child-friendly way full of fun and games.
If you want to consciously choose sensory toys for your child, you should pay a visit to our online store and see our colorful assortment for yourself.
FAQ: Everything parents need to know about sensory development
Here you will find answers to the most frequently asked questions about sensory development in children:
What is sensory development?
Sensory development includes perception via the five senses as well as the interpretation of these impressions and the reaction to them.
What is sensory integration?
The term "sensory integration" refers to the absorption and processing of sensory impressions.
What impact does sensory development have on learning?
Sensory development and cognition are closely linked. If there are problems in sensory development, this can have a negative impact on cognitive development. A child's cognitive learning ability is largely dependent on whether they are able to perceive their environment in detail and understand it on this basis.
At what age does it make sense to promote sensory development?
Basically, you can hardly start supporting your child's sensory development too early. After all, some sensory skills already develop in the womb.
What promotes sensory development and what are sensory activities?
Essentially, it is the experiences with different sensory impressions that promote sensory development. Sensory activities are games and everyday activities that are rich in sensory impressions and therefore promote the development of sensory skills.