What is Hiding in Our Jelly?

Since our first play experience with jelly, my kids have been asking if we could do it again.  They had so much fun exploring their five senses with jelly and then cleaning up with some water play, I couldn’t resist.  This time I hid some items in the jelly for them to squeeze and squish through to find.  It was great fun and it added to the excitement; my girls squealed with delight when they discovered something in the jelly!

What you will need?

You will need packet jelly crystals, assortment of plastic containers and large tray or container to put all the jelly mess in for playtime.  You could hide just about anything in the jelly; we used plastic numbers, toy animals and coloured beads.  Anything that will wash up well and be able to be reused.

When preparing the jelly to set I placed the plastic numbers, toys animals and coloured beads into the mix.  I tried to put the yellow items in the yellow jelly and the blue items in the blue jelly and so on to help disguise them a bit as the jelly is transparent.

Let’s Play 

Let the squishing begin!!  Feeling through the jelly to find what is hiding.

My little Miss 19 months is very interested in animal sounds at the moment so I hid some plastic toy animals in the jelly. “Woof woof!”

Let’s Explore 

Hiding numbers in the jelly is a great way of introducing numbers to kids.  We have also been focusing on basic number counting with Miss 19 months (counting 1, 2 and 3) but this was also great for Miss 4 to randomly recall her numbers not within a sequence.

Let’s Discover

A whole lot of playing!

Yummy jelly soup – so much fun blending the colours and making new ones.

Miss 1 and 4 couldn’t resist but to sit in it!

….and a whole lot of eating!

Let’s Play Some More 

The clean up!  This is just as much fun as playing with the jelly.  My girls washed out all the containers and rinsed the jelly through the lawn.  They got completely soaked but no longer sticky!

Let’s Learn 

Benefits of sensory play with jelly:

• Number and animal sounds recognition
• Sensory play encourages children to manipulate materials, building up their fine motor skills and coordination.
• Sensory play uses all 5 senses, but the sense of touch is often the most frequent. Toddlers and children process information through their senses.  They learn through exploring these.
• Sensory play is process-driven, not product-oriented; it is the purest sense of exploratory learning.
• Self-esteem: sensory play offers kids the opportunity for self-expression because there is no right answer and children feel safe to change or experiment with what they are doing.
• Language development: experimenting with language and trying new words.

Sensory Play with Jelly

To view our previous post on playing with jelly, click on the image.

Other Sensory Play Ideas you make like to try:

– Scented Rice Sensory Play

– Rainbow Rice & Bottle Tops

– Rainbow Rice Sensory Bags

– Sensory Alphabet Hunt

– Sensory Play with Sand

– Sensory Play with Fluffy Snow

– Water Balloons in the Bath

– Bottle Tops and Bubbles