Sensory activities are essential for the development of little brains. Plus, they’re lots of fun! With all the colors, smells, sights, sounds, tastes, and textures of fall, this is a great time of year to stimulate little ones’ senses and spend quality time together doing a range of fall sensory crafts.
Support your child’s education and learning with crafts at home. Easy to do, these are our favorite ideas for fall sensory crafts for preschoolers:
Yarn Apples
When it comes to fall sensory crafts, we especially love that this yarn apple craft from Red Ted Art can be a quick five-minute craft or a longer ongoing project. It’s easy for kids to manage and can be soothing for active minds. It combines the textures of cardboard and wool along with the different colors of apples; red and green as well as brown for the stalks.
Leaf Monsters
This fun leaf craft idea from Crafty Kids at Home is a terrific way to spend time outdoors before creating the monsters. Head outside into the yard or the park to gather leaves of all shapes and sizes. Your little one can have fun scrunching some dead leaves too. Decorate the leaves with stickers and marker pens (you could even add glitter glue) before adding different textured eyes for the full-on monster effect.
Puffy Paint Pumpkin
Using just shaving foam, clear glue, and orange food coloring, these puffy paint pumpkins from Emma Owl are fantastic sense-stimulating crafts for preschoolers. Add a few drops of cinnamon food flavoring or some pumpkin spice for some delicious smells too. When finished, why not add leaves and a twig or cinnamon stick stem too? Either way its easy to see why this is one of our favorite fall sensory crafts!
Autumn Tree Craft
This lovely autumn tree from Crafts on Sea is a great no-mess craft that requires little preparation or materials. You or your child can color in the tree trunk and then, with blobs of fall-colored paint securely inside a ziplock bag, your child can have fun squishing the paint to make their own unique tree design.
Fall Mobile
Another top idea from Red Ted Art, this fall mobile is fully customizable with various bits and pieces from nature. Encourage your child to collect a variety of fall items from outdoors, such as pinecones, leaves, acorns, and twigs. You can either paint some items or leave them completely natural. Adding bells to the mobile creates even more sensory appeal.
Fall Finger Painting
Whether you draw the outlines of common fall features, like pumpkins, apples, and trees, or whether you give your child a blank piece of paper and tell them to get creative, finger painting is a great sensory craft for kids. Add more sensory stimulation when you use this simple edible finger paint recipe from mommypotamus.
Spice Printing
Emma Owl’s playdough and spice printing offer a great introduction to the wonderful aromas of spices. Use scented playdough, such as the recommended apple pie playdough, for more enticing smells. Your kids can enjoy feeling the different textures of spices and have fun creating prints. We think adapting this to use spices and paint to print on paper would be another top sensory craft for preschoolers.
