Sensory play is an essential first step to thinking like a scientist, or mathematician, or even an artist! We naturally use our senses to discover and investigate the world around us.
When you give children time to explore using their senses you are giving opportunities for self-discovery and find new ways of thinking. This sensory loaded activity will have children learning through their sense of touch, taste, and sight. Read below for our whole tutorial.
Materials:
- Flavored Gelatin (We used 6 flavors but you can keep it simple and start with 1 or 2 flavors)
- Yogurt
- Spoon (1 per color)
- Bowl (1 per color)
- Fruit
- Plastic Cutting Mat (optional)
Teaching Strategy:
Scoop two spoonfuls of yogurt into the bowl.
Sprinkle in a spoonful of your choice of flavored gelatin. Add more gelatin for a darker color and stronger taste or less gelatin for a lighter color and less flavor. Stir the gelatin so it mixes in well with the yogurt.
Pair your yogurt with matching colored fruit. Discuss what types of fruit would match the different colors.
Create! Let your learners explore and play with their fruit and yogurt.
After mixing the different colored yogurts, this learner turned his yogurt mix into a pirate’s face with the addition of strawberries.
(see the left strawberry…that is the eye patch)
Which then led to the creation of a bicycle.
CLEAN UP TIP: We used a plastic cutting mat as our canvas so my young artists would scoop the yogurt and add the fruit on their mat to create their work of art.
Younger learners may wish to scoop the colored yogurt use their fingers to draw in it and eat. This is a great way to explore using their sense of taste and touch.
STEAM Activity Extension:
Turn your edible artwork into a blended smoothie.
We added milk, spinach (because we love green smoothies), 2 bananas (this helps make it creamy), and ice to the fruit/yogurt mix.
Blend it all together and we had a second delicious snack from the leftover fruit and yogurt.
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