Author: Jumble House

It’s all about texture and sensory play. 

Make a Feely Box 

A fun game which will improve your child’s sense of touch and increase their vocabulary. 

All you need is a plastic box. A 4 litre size is good. 

Fill with rice. You will need quite a large quantity so choose the cheapest. 

A few items with varying texture. 

To play:

Start with 4 larger objects. So maybe a fir cone, a toothbrush, a pen and a small bottle.

When your child is confident finding these larger objects make it more difficult by hiding small objects like keys and paper clips and small bottle tops and hair slides and bobbles and Lego and tiny toys.

Put the 4 objects on the table and let your child handle them so they becone familiar with  the shape and texture. This is a good opportunity to introduce new texture words like smooth, rough, prickly, spongy, squashy and shape words, round, long, hollow, oval, square, circular etc 

Then hide the objects in the rice and take turns in finding one of the objects by touch. Model the finding process when it’s your turn by describing what you can feel. I usually deliberately find one or two of the ‘wrong’ items so I can model the ‘finding’ vocabulary. 

For example if I was asked to find the toothbrush I could say: 

“I can feel something. It’s long and thin and smooth.  It the same shape as a toothbrush and the handle is smooth like a toothbrush but it hasn’t any bristles.  So it can’t be the toothbrush. I need to try again. ”

It is better if you cover the box with some paper to prevent any visual clues otherwise it’s open to cheating!