Senses in Season: How to Engage All 8 Senses with Winter Activities

During the winter, keeping your child entertained and regulated with weather changes, more hours of darkness, and a busy holiday season can be hard. There are a lot of activities in the winter that support all the senses for children to regulate and celebrate this wonderful time of year. This blog provides ideas for activities that support all 8 senses: proprioception, gustatory, auditory, olfactory, tactile, vestibular, visual, and interoception. Read about how important stimulating and regulating your senses during the winter is for supporting your child’s development, reactions, and emotional control during the winter season.

How Supporting the Senses Develops a Healthy Child

Sensory play develops language, motor, and cognitive skills. It also supports experimentation as kids learn to explore and try new things to see what they like and what they don’t (Cleveland Clinic, 2022). Building proprioception and interoception makes children aware of their bodies and themselves in relation to the space around them. Creating this awareness supports appropriate social interactions and safe choices for their bodies (Cleveland Clinic, 2022). Having them try new activities can support their vestibular system where they can practice appropriate balance and safe movements as well in space. It is crucial to engage all senses due to their link between the person and the outside world. You support wisdom, perspectives, and abilities that help a child understand their environment (Delfina Giler Giler et al., 2019). With this type of play, you are helping your child learn to make sense of and trust their interpretation of what is happening around them. Play is already acknowledged as a vital part of brain development for neurological development and academic success, which comes from learning these skills (Sher et al., 2013). Adding sensory play to your child’s life increases the benefits they have as they grow.

Proprioception

Using a small kids' shovel, you can practice scooping pillows. Fill ziplock bags with beans or rice, put them in a mitten, close them over themselves, and then use them as homemade beanbags. Put heavy objects in an empty box and push it across the room on a carpeted floor. Do reindeer races or kicks with a wheelbarrow race or practice back leg kicks. For more information on these activities, go to OT Toolbox. Using different sizes of rolls or stacked paper towels/toilet paper rolls, you can have your child work on using tongs to balance crumpled paper on the top. Works on body awareness and motor skills. Going sledding provides deep and intense proprioceptive input with pumps and hills. During holiday parties, allow your child to hand out gifts if they are proprioceptive seekers, allowing them to get the heavy impacts and participate socially. Using a rolling pin to roll out dough or a cookie cutter to press shapes can be an excellent way to work on proprioception.

Gustatory

Use a peppermint stick as a straw by sticking it into a cut-in-half orange and start sucking. The juices make their way up and work the mouth muscles and challenge the senses with intense flavors. Have your child try the (clean) snow and talk about what they taste and how they are different when trying various holiday foods. This encourages them to expand their palates and challenge their senses. It increases awareness and builds skills. Have them participate in meals and help you cook; this allows them to feel more engaged and can increase the likelihood of them eating or trying the foods you eat if they are sensitive but also gustatory seeking. Make homemade/edible playdough that they can play with and is safe to eat. Utilize items that are appropriate to be mouthed while playing.

Tactile

Using glue, draw ornaments, trees, and other winter items and cover them in salt, then let them dry. Using water and food coloring, you can make paint to paint the raised pictures. Works on fine motor skills but also creates raised art to touch. Draw a tree on a cardboard and then punch holes for ornaments. Get qtips, color them, and cut them in half so your kid can stick them through the tree to decorate it. Going outside and making snowballs/forts or snow angels are all tactile experiences that are unique to winter. Teach your children about cold and hot textures, how they change, and how they can be different each time. Make cookies or desserts with your child. The hand mixing of the dough can be good for building tactile feelings. When wrapping presents for family and friends, have your child help. The various boxes, gifts, papers, and tape can increase their tactile sensations!

Olfactory

Baking with your child and having them smell all the things as you mix spices or create meals teaches them about various smells and what they go into. Creating fake snow, which you can find a how-to video in on the Silent Nights & Soft Lights: Crafting a Sensory Friendly Christmas blog post, provides scents that can be calming as a child does activities that may be out of their comfort zone. Use scents like peppermint to engage your child in activities and increase awareness/focus for activities. Utilize scents like pine when decorating your Christmas tree if it isn’t real. Provide the scent and help your child associate appropriate scents with objects and concepts. Have them describe what they smell when by a wood fire or stove and discuss what is happening to create that scent.

Interoception

Outdoor activities like building snowmen, making snow angels, and sledding also build your interoception skills. You can work on mindful walking and deep breathing when bundled up outside to increase your child's awareness of their feelings and work on being present. Playing with ice cubes or fake snow also teaches them to be aware of the feelings and how the cold snow or ice makes their insides feel. Wearing layers of clothes and talking about how it can feel tight or warm also builds this awareness of their body and how it makes them feel.

Use this snow man activity to discuss with your child how to listen to their body and what to pay attention to. Being Mindful especially during the holidays can help everyone stay in a state of emotional balance with busy schedules and changes in routines.

Vestibular

Providing opportunities to ice skate works on balance. Also, it engages various other senses with the cold ice, which can be tactile and proprioception, to work on awareness so as not to bump into others. If you want to sled inside the house, use a blanket, have your child sit in it, and stay upright as you pull them around the house. Hold a winter Olympics, set up a space with mats or cushions, and have your child work on tumbling, somersaults, and jumping skills. Practice safe walking on the ice to help them not fall throughout the rest of winter and learn balance techniques. Sliding on a sled also challenges these skills. Pretend to be Santa, have them carry a bag over their shoulder, and tip-toe up the steps. This reenactment builds various skills, especially vestibular skills such as tip-toeing, stair walking, and standing or climbing a ladder.

Visual

Put Christmas lights in a cardboard box that you punched holes in and make a sensory tent for your child to view the lights in up close. Making cookies into shapes and decorating them can improve visual skills and be good memory practice. Describe the gift you want your child to grab or the item of cooking or baking in the kitchen and see if your child can spot it. Have them use their eyes to identify what you want! Play Ispy with winter items when you are out to keep your child engaged and entertained.

Auditory

Listen to Christmas music with words and then in stores when it is the sound, see if they can remember, and work on auditory memory skills. This can be done at home as well on karaoke nights. Talking about animals like the winter and the noises they make, pretend to be them. Playing with bells and making music with various shapes, sizes, and sounding instruments. Look for snowglobes that play music or other holiday decor. Have dance parties in your house to get moving, while it is hard to get outside in the cold and dark winter months. The sound of bubble wrap popping, tape or presents ripping or crumbling wrapping paper can be a auditory seekers ’s dream. Have them be in charge of collecting and bagging the trash after opening presents.

References

Cleveland Clinic. (2022, March 18). What is sensory play? The benefits for your child and sensory play ideas. Health Essentials. https://health.clevelandclinic.org/benefits-of-sensory-play-ideas

Delfina Giler Giler, R., Yarita Macias Zambrano, T., Enrique Vera Anzules, F., Del Pilar Zambrano Burgos, V. (2019, August). Sensory playful corners on stimulation of children from one to three years. International Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities 3(2), 217-223. https://doi.org/10.29332/ijssh.v3n2.317

Sher, B., Beardsley, K., & Butler, R. (2013). The whole spectrum of social, motor, and sensory games : using every child’s natural love of play to enhance key skills and promote inclusion (1st ed.). Jossey-Bass, a Wiley brand.