Rice play, pasta play, water play, food play, mud, paint without brushes! Messy play provides learning, creative and developmental opportunities for children to forge new brain connections, develop their movement skills, and even build up problem solving skills, allowing them to express themselves and stimulate their senses.
Messy play resources mixed with age and developmentally appropriate toys and tools enable messy play to be utilised by all age groups.
The advantage of messy play is that there is so much variety and flexibility. You can incorporate messy play in any theme/topic you are planning and apply it across the board to framework sectors and statements.
- Counting and sorting coloured ice cubes.
- Learning about the world around us with food play.
- Exploring the difference between dry and wet pasta.
- Hand/footprints to learn about our bodies.
There are so many opportunities to create fun, exciting and expressive activities, fostering curiosity, imagination and exploration within the children, that actually has a deeper learning approach than just “creating a mess”!
It’s all about letting children explore and experiment with different objects, raw materials and mixed resources without any end goals to restrict them. There is no right way to carry out messy play.
