“Sensory play” means activities that stimulate one or more of the child’s senses: touch, taste, smell, sight, hearing, vestibular, and proprioception.

Sensory activities help the brain focus, self-regulate, reduce distractions, and build neural connections to learn and retain information. Sensory stimulation is critical for brains to develop and strengthen sensory-related synapses and functions. When using more than one sense, a child will learn and retain more information!

Sensory exploration allows us to provide language stimulation in a meaningful context and create functional learning opportunities. Teaching functional language in a natural way is crucial for early language development. In addition, sensory play is fun and keeps children engaged and motivated! It takes the focus off of the articulation or language targets – making therapy feel less like work, and great for generalizing skills.

Use sensory play in speech therapy to target vocabulary expansion, sentence fluency, question comprehension, following directions, inferencing and more!