Preparing Your Child for School Through Multi-Sensory Play

Young children learn best when they can experience new things with all of their senses. Pre-schoolers need to see, hear, feel, touch, smell, and sometimes even taste a learning material in order to really understand it fully. Here are some suggestions for building multi-sensory experiences into your child's play at home in a way that will prepare her for the academic world:

• Buy touch and feel books or scratch and sniff for her first reading material.

• Mix up pudding or other creamy foods to use as finger paint in writing numbers and words. Or help her create letters out of bread dough.

• Use Cheerios, raisins, or peanuts as counters for doing simple math activities.

• Help awaken early scientific exploration through natural multi-sensory experiences, such as cooking, building dams and forts, and water play.

• Encourage language experiences through drama and dress-up activities.

• Finally, provide lots of art supplies including clay, paints, and paste-up materials, so that your child can unfold her deeper creative capacities.

In each of these ways, you'll be helping to prepare your child for the world of academics that's just around the corner.

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