We love messy play at Rainbow. It is very important for children’s development that there are messy play opportunities across all our ranges that provide challenging and sensory play experiences for children.
Very young children engage in messy play automatically, beginning when they ‘play’ with their food during feeding. It’s very healthy to leave children to explore and ‘experience’ their food (but messy!) without too much adult intervention to keep things ‘clean’!
Children love to explore and will naturally be drawn to all that is messy – for example mud, earth, water, paint, glue.
Messy play provides children with direct contact with the medium which helps them to understand perception and increases their awareness of texture. Messy play is soothing and there are no expectations placed on the child for a finished product. Children learn through active use of all their senses; this is the core of the messy play ethos.
Messy play is always active and it makes good use of all senses, it is not a passive activity, and children can explore and experience the different media in their own way, relevant to their own stage of development. For example a child experiencing the texture, smell and sensation of shaving foam for the first time in our baby unit, will engage with it in different ways to those playing with the dinosaurs in coloured shaving foam in the preschool unit, who are incorporating the media into their small world imaginary experiences.
Children’s motor skills, language skills and cognitive skills all improve through consistent, regular sessions with messy play, which is why in every one of our Rainbow units, we schedule messy play several times a week, with a range of different media. Specifically, messy play can help with:
- relaxation of muscles
- development of gross and fine motor skills
- development of self-help skills
- development of social play, turn taking and sharing
- development of concentration and observation skills
- development of bonding
- development of body awareness
- development of communication skills.
Messy Play is a means by which children can learn and explore the world around them; many thinking (or cognitive) skills are learnt incidentally through our response to our environment, and messy play lends itself so well to this kind of incidental development.
When engaging in messy play, there is no right or wrong way to do anything. Everything is new and exciting and there to be explored and discovered. It is through experimentation and exploration that children discover the infinite array of uses for each of the mediums we offer as part of their play.
The skin is the biggest organ of the human body and it is full of sensory receptors. It is incredibly important to stimulate children’s sense of touch and certainly for children in the early stages of their lives, the sense of touch is a very important means to find out and make sense of the world around them.
We use a huge array of different media as part of our messy play sessions at Rainbow, and this list gives you a favour of some of them!
Jelly, Custard, Cooked pastas, shaving foam, grated lemons, soaps of all kinds (shaved, bubbles, paste), newspaper and shredded paper in water, flour, gloop. fruit skins, baked beans, rice and coloured rices, all sorts of dough and play dough, corn flour, lentils, snow (homemade), moonsand, water beads, baked beans, cooked spaghetti, mud, oats, mousses!
If you dare… Messy play is also something that you can do at home, and extend children’s experiences from nursery. A good starting point could be making or using play-dough with children, click here to see our website of play-dough recipe books that you can use! If you are really brave, you can consider getting really messy, and here are two further guides which have been produced by Play Scotland; both of which give some lovely ideas!
Click here to download Messy Play Booklet 1 (Play Scotland)
Click here to download Messy Play Booklet 2 (Play Scotland)
Click here to see our Messy Play Gallery!