Find the Best Touch Play Items at the Dollar Store
Sensory activities are a great way for young children to explore and learn, and I’m a big fan of finding ways to create these activities with subjects you already have at home . But sometimes you need to swap things out or stock up on a few new items to stash away for a boring day. And then your local dollar store (or a dollar aisle at a large retail store) can help you.
They are called sensory activities because they engage our senses. Thus, you will need items with a variety of textures that can be easily manipulated with little fingers, brightly colored or scented.
A recent trip to several stores in my area — Dollar Tree, Dollar Spot at Target, and Five Below — provided a couple of new strategies that you might find helpful when shopping for sensory in-game items.
Focus on affecting multiple senses
Any activity that deeply touches one feeling is good; it’s even better if you can find something that touches two or more senses at the same time.
For example, Five Below had an impressively large selection of goo (a good sensory item), but my attention was drawn to the Scented Carbonated Loop, which uses both touch and smell. Great name, great gift for your touch functions.
Anything to do with playing with water has always been a success in my home, and the aromatic finger paint in the bathtub would be hard to beat. You can splash around and create a giant colorful mess while inhaling the fruity aromas.
I even found what comes in THREE senses – gingerbread houses have different textures for the fingers, they smell delicious and you can eat your masterpiece when you’re done (we ate ours once and it doesn’t taste good, but the feeling. nevertheless did).
Plus they look cool! These are the four senses!
Go to season
Speaking of gingerbread houses – you can always find bubbles, bumps, or goo in the regular aisles of these stores, but you will probably find the best selection of sensory activities in the seasonal portion of the dollar store or dollar aisle. You can usually find a new twist on old favorites. For example, Kinetic Sand is incredible material. But at Target this time of year, you can find “winter sand” – plus this “snow surprise”, a holiday version of the traditional clay-buried dinosaur activity:
Or a seasonal squishy that can also be decorated:
The dollar tree, in particular, didn’t have a lot of real sensory action in the normal toy aisles, but the seasonal section offered more art and creativity, such as these kids coloring bags:
I liked them because the texture of the canvas of the bag is different from the usual smooth paper that children are used to painting on. And if you have scent markers at home, you can pull them out for an even richer sensory experience.
Dollar shops / sections are also a great place to stock up on basic items like gel window holders, practice bags, puffy or glitter stickers, Silly Putty and Play-Doh, which have different textures for kids.