Train Up a Child: Exploring the Sense of Touch

Going along with our 5 Senses theme in our All About Me unit, we did a couple activities that revolved around the sense of touch. If you follow Train Up a Child you know that we regularly engage in sensory play. While I try to stimulate as many senses as possible while playing, most of the activities we do center around touch. Because of this I wanted to do something with my boys that demonstrated how important the sense of touch is in our every day life.

I grabbed a few items from our studio and put them in a brown paper bag. JZ and J-Bug took turns reaching in the bag and describing the item they grabbed without peeking.

Sometimes J-Bug (3) needed a little prompting, but I encouraged the boys to use descriptive words while feeling what was in their hands.

JZ really got a kick out of the game. Even though I could tell he knew what he was handling, he kept his eyes shut and continued to feel each object.

Upon opening his eyes he broke out into a grin as he saw what he held.

After feeling and guessing each item I had the boys put socks on their hands, and we started from the beginning.

No matter how hard they tried, they couldn't get a solid feel for the objects in their hands. Since they had already felt each of the items sometimes they managed to guess correctly, but for the most part they couldn't tell what they held in their sock covered hands.

The other touch related activity we did was play in a bin full of cooked spaghetti.

I always welcome sensory exploration involving more than just our hands, and for this lesson in particular I jumped at the opportunity to explain that we feel with more than our hands. When JZ stepped on the pasta I asked him to described how it felt to his toes.

One of the many benefits of sensory play is the opportunity to incorporate different descriptive words. I've done this with my children since birth, and I believe it is one of the tools that helped them have a large vocabulary at a young age.