Sensory Play Ideas For the Eco-Conscious Mama
•Posted on September 17 2019
Guest Blog By: Tiffany Griffin, a mama, superhero and long-time member of the STC family.
Playing dough – a staple of childhood creativity. There isn’t a child alive that doesn’t love to create with their hands. It’s a simple – messy play activity that stimulates fine motor skills by learning to manipulate and control the dough. It is an amazingly fun and easy sensory building tool. It encourages hand strengthening, proprioceptive development (deep pressure input for joints), and sensory-motor development. You can also introduce delicious smelling dough to stimulate the olfactory system on top of all the other fun benefits of this timeless play activity.
Not only is playing dough a sensory-positive invitation to play and create. It also benefits socioemotional skills. That means it provides a lot of open-ended opportunities for children to experience independent and cooperative play with other children – or mom and dad! In both styles of play, children are exploring abilities, life experiences, and emotions. During play with other children, they are learning about cooperation, collaboration, self-control, friendships and exploring the depths of their own creativity while also potentially lowering stress levels. If you’re anything like me, and most adults I assume, isn’t the first thing you do is roll the dough into a ball? Hello, home-made stress ball! Imagine how this is the same for children.
Even if we realize it or not, these simple everyday play activities are incredibly important to our children’s development. Unfortunately, in our era of motherhood, we must pay extra and close attention to what it is that goes in and on our children’s bodies.
If your child has a gluten, or wheat allergy, eating store-bought doughs may cause his/her to develop an allergic reaction. Big-name doughs are also loaded in synthetic dyes. Studies suggest that children who ingested artificial coloring were more likely to exhibit decreased attention and hyperactive behavior among many other adverse effect’s dyes can have on children. The studies are scary. And this is what we are giving them to play with? No thank you.
Thankfully, Mama’s all over the world are working hard to change the world bit by bit to make safer, quality products for our children. Shops like Sweet Tea Caviar are dedicated to bringing only the best products for our babies all in one place. Enter: Land of Dough.
Land of Dough is 100% handmade and handcrafted, that uses rich natural vegetable dyes and biodegradable glitter so you can feel confident in what you let your babes play with. So natural – it even does better in the fridge when its time to be put up! But on top of that - it smells amazing! The cups are themed, giving each one its one special magic and an experience on its own. Visually, I am not sure it could even be more appealing. We are a homeschooling family, so the themed cups fit in perfectly with our lifestyle. Add a cup to a certain subject your studying – such as the Lava Dough or the Galaxy…and you have yourself a fun, sensory learning tool that even you will want to get your hands on.
We are so thankful for progressive thinking stores like STC for introducing us to safer alternatives to household needs and wants to help us raise our babies confidently. The possibilities are SAFE and endless. Along with our new favorite natural soaps, Land of dough is our new household norm for natural and safe play. (P.S they make AMAZING gifts!)