Benefits of Easy Messy Play Activities & Following Your Child’s Lead

I often tell parents that even 5-minutes of present play a day can make an impact on language development.  It’s not about being perfect.  Being present and following your child’s lead can result in some of the most meaningful learning of their day.  As Albert Einstein said “play is the highest form of research” for our children.  With that being said easy and messy art can provide a host of benefits to your little one.  In this activity I used glitter letters and numbers for tactile/multimodal learning cues, shapes, glue, and tracing.  Absolutely nothing fancy, and done on the fly.

No Time-Art Time-Tips

  1. Messy play is incredibly beneficial for a child’s sensory and regulation development.
  2. Cutting paper into different shapes and gluing them is a great way to model and build spatial, action, and descriptive vocabulary.  For example: press, sticky, stick, on top, next to, shape identification, color identification, and more!
  3. Glitter letter and numbers are AMAZING tactile cues!  The glitter is rough, so tracing it with their fingers gives children extra input while learning instead of just visual input!  Leaving a letter or number our is a great way to practice sequencing, letter/number ID, and tracing!
  4. Following your child’s lead and engaging in learning through play is one of the best ways to enhance emotional connection to learning!  This learning is DEEP learning, and easily generalized. Not to mention FUN!