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The benefits of messy play exploration
The nursery tamariki have been very busy exploring lots of messy play and art experiences. We have really enjoyed using different things to paint our pictures with. We have used paint brushes, cotton buds, small balls, different shaped stampers, and we especially love to use our fingers and hands. This has led to an interest in messy play where we have had the opportunity to develop our senses like smell, sight, and especially touch and taste.
Painting and messy play offers lots of opportunities for our tamariki to develop many skills. It promotes physical development through developing fine motor skills through holding onto different shaped brushes, thin cotton buds or small round balls, squishing and squeezing. We used words such as cold, wet, sticky, slimy, squishy, dry, to encourage language development. But best of all it fosters curiosity, imagination and exploration for our smallest tamariki.
Wanting to make our messy play authentic, we collected some little gardens from the supermarket. We started off by planting the seedlings. We each had a turn at mixing the dry dirt together with the water and had fun putting the wet dirt into the wee cups. We then added the seeds and over the following two weeks we were able to watch the seeds grow into small plants. It was then time to plant them into our pallet garden. We are now enjoying watching the plants grow and are all looking forward to the time when we can try the different vegetables that we have planted.