Sensory play: discovery bags

Last month I posted about the discovery bottles I made for Isabelle. Today's sensory play activity is somewhat similar - discovery bags.

As with the bottles, these little gems are fantastically easy to make, and totally addictive to play with (and that's me I'm talking about!)

The basic ingredients for your discovery bags are:

- ziplock bags
- hair gel/shower gel/something of 'gel' consistency
-  tape
- your discovery items

Simply pop some gel into a bag, throw in the 'extra items', squeeze out the air and seal it up using the zip and some duct tape to reinforce. I actually duct taped our bag the whole way round the edge as I knew the first thing Isabelle would do would be to stick it into her mouth (I was right!). This gave us some protection to make sure she didn't get any hair gel in her mouth.

Inside our first bag, I used blue hair gel (15p from Tesco for a pot), and threw in some buttons, metallic confetti shapes and shiny gems. The idea of these bags is to allow little fingers to explore the items, and 'mush' them around in the hair gel, which is great for fine motor skills, and the feel of the gel is very tactile.

You really could put anything into these bags - just make sure there are no sneaky sharp edges on the items you choose. For older children, animal shapes, letters, shapes, numbers or coloured items to play recognition games would be fantastic, as they can sort the items by squeezing them into certain areas, or simply sorting through the bag to find what they are looking for. Using shower gel  will create lots of bubbles as little fingers poke at it and sprinkling of glitter in any bag will always add something great too!

Sadly, Isabelle 'razor nails' Jay managed to puncture the bag in less than two minutes. This was easily fixed with a spot of duct tape however, in future, I will be using a clear parcel tape all over the bag to reinforce the entire structure before she gets her claws into it.

I think that this activity would actually be better suited to older children, as Izzy wasn't anywhere near as interested in the bag as she was in some of her other sensory play toys, and preferred chewing the edges to exploring what was inside. I, however, love squeezing the gel about, so at least someone is making use of it!