What is Sensorimotor?

The first two years of life is the Sensorimotor stage. During this period, infants learn through their senses and movements. Exposure to new textures and sounds helps their brain make connections with the world around them. Infants start exploring the world using their senses and motor skills. It is important for parents and caregivers to allow activities that expose them to sensory experiences to further their brain development.

Early Stages of Cognitive Development

According to Jean Piaget, there are four stages of cognitive development, with the sensorimotor stage being the first. It has six separate parts of development:

1. Refluxes (0-1): Understanding world through sucking and looking.

2. Primary Circular Reactions (0-4 months): Repeating pleasurable actions.

3. Secondary Circular Reactions (4-8 months): Repeating actions to get a response.

4. Coordination of Reactions (8-12 months): Clear intentional actions.

5. Tertiary Circular Reactions (12-18 months): Trial and error experiments.

6. Early Representational thought (18-24 months): Develope symbols to represent objects or events.

   
   

During this stage, one significant milestone is understanding object permanence: knowing an object exists even when unseen. Motivating sensory, language, art, nature, and science activities allows the expansion of the infant's brain. In the early years, the brain is like a sponge, ready to absorb information but not yet set in its reactions. Infants learn by doing.

Importance of Sensory Exposure

If an infant is left in a swing all day or a child in front of a TV, how is their brain exploring or growing? It is not; they are stuck with the same experiences and reactions. Infants learn by seeing and exploring. How are they going to learn different feelings and reactions if their only experiences are eating, sleeping, pooping, and being in the swing? Even when infants are newborns, talking to them and explaining the world, such as "your milk is in a blue bottle" or "Mommy is wearing a green shirt," makes a big impact. Always remember that even on a hard day, pointing out that a blanket is soft or the ground is cold allows your infant's mind to grow and understand the world around them.

Engaging Activities for Infants

During my time as an infant teacher, I found multiple engaging activities that allowed infants' minds to grow and explore. I found that the earlier I started to expose them to sensory experiences, the less they were afraid to touch or explore things as they got older.

Children have sensory issues with many different things, such as paint, slime, grass, sand, playdough, etc. When children are afraid to explore a sensory activity, there are many ways to get them involved, such as:

- Putting the sensory material in a plastic bag to feel through.

- Using a container.

- Doing hand-over-hand exploration.

- Exploring the material yourself first to show it is okay.

Sensory issues can cause problems with eating. In my classroom, I would mix sensory and eating activities, ensuring everything was taste-safe. This allowed the infants to feel different textures and scents, helping with eating when a food has a different texture or scent. Learning to eat is already messy, so why not make it sensory so that when new things are in front of them, they aren't afraid?

Sensory Bottles and Bags

One activity I enjoyed doing in my classroom was making sensory bottles and bags. I could expand this activity to many different holidays and seasons. Filling bottles or bags with oil, water, glue, soap, glitter, rocks, etc., offers many possibilities since the bottles will be sealed shut. For Halloween, I have used googly eyes and colored pom-poms to make a monster in a bottle or bag.

When putting these together, I have the infant in a high chair or on a tummy time mat. I show the infant the materials as I put them in and do hand-over-hand exploration for them to feel the materials. When finished, I would hot glue the caps on or duct tape them; for the bags, I would duct tape the seal. The infants would explore this sensory material during circle time to further a story.

For infants 0-4 months, I would place the sensory bottles or bags in front of them during tummy time to motivate holding their head up and reaching out. If I did the activity in the bag, it made a great tummy time sensory mat for a full-body experience of exploring the textures in the bag. For older infants (4-12 months), during sitting up and movement time, I would motivate picking up the bottle, shaking it, rolling it, and moving it around.