Supporting speech with sensory play part 2: sensory water play & play routines
- jessicabunnell2
- Jul 31
- 6 min read
Three fun and easy ways to turn water bins into a play routine designed to boost language (plus a free poster)!
Welcome back to our summer series on supporting speech and language with sensory play! We love finding fun ways to add sensory play into our everyday activities so we can use that natural exploration to support speech and language goals. If you missed our last blog post all about sand and sensory play, head here to check it out! This month, we are ‘diving into’ water play to explore how play routines, sensory exploration, and language development intersect!
Let’s chat about some easy ways that we can incorporate water play activities into a play routine and learn the ‘why’ behind how this supports development and learning.
Play Routines & Sequencing…what are they and how can they support development?
Before we can chat about incorporating water play, let’s break down what a play routine is! This simply means creating a predictable series of actions/steps that can be repeated. Play routines have built in repetition and are often structured to include a beginning, middle and end. This type of play really helps to build sequencing skills and create that structure during play that many kiddos benefit from! An example of a simple play routine with a little one might be stacking play blocks, excitedly saying ‘a..choo’, and knocking them over! This is a three-step sequence of simple actions that the child can learn, participate in, and as they become more independent with it, repeat over and over again! This type of play provides a wonderful foundation for adding steps into the play routine to help build skills like joint attention, early cognitive skills, turn-taking, and language! Sequencing different actions and items in play is an important step in a child’s understanding that concepts can be combined to create new meanings. Play routines with repeatable actions/steps provide those built-in opportunities for new vocabulary and sentence structures as different actions and concepts are combined in play!Â
These routines can be so helpful for our tiny little ones as we use repetition and target words during play and they can grow and evolve as the kiddos continue to learn more about their world and develop the language to capture what they know! For older kiddos, a play sequence might involve more pretend play and/or complex sequences of activities like sleeping, eating, traveling, shopping, cooking, and more!Â
Water Pretend Play Routines
 Now that we know how helpful play routines can be for our kiddos, how can we incorporate water and sensory play? Let’s take a look at three simple ideas for turning a bin of water into hours of play!
1) Imagination Station Bin
The activity: create a water station with a bin of water and some simple nature items (bonus points if you go on a scavenger hunt for these items and practice using vocabulary and different sentence structures to talk about what you find and the locations of each item!). Some ideas for treasures to collect for the station might be leaves, sticks, flowers, pebbles, acorns, pinecones…the list goes on! Then, set up activities for figurine/character toys with each of the nature items. Help your kiddos use their imagination to turn each nature item into an item that the figurine can use after they jump into the swimming pool tub of water! Some of our favorites are leaves as towels, sticks as a bed, pinecones as cars, acorns as food etc. After they use their imaginations to create an item out of each nature treasure, we can create a play routine that involves actions such as sleeping, eating, swimming, drying off, traveling to a new place etc… the possibilities are endless!Â
The Language: There are so many ways to practice language with this open-ended play! For younger kiddos, you can pick an action word (jump, drive, swim) etc. to talk about during the activities. Practice talking about what the character is doing during each step in the routine…one of our favorite parts of play routines is the built-in repetition! You can model the same word (or words) each time the character goes through the play routine for added language learning! For older kiddos, you might have them make a sentence to tell you what the character is doing during each part of their routine. You can talk about the different nature item vocabulary words as you play and ask simple questions to practice the concepts of who, what and where (who is jumping?, what is elmo doing?, where is he swimming?’). You can even work on concepts like past-tense verbs, sentence structures, and time concepts (before/during/next etc.) by talking about what each character will do, is doing, and just finished! (e.g., I bet Elmo is going to swim next, Elmo is swimming, Elmo just swam!). The key is to have fun and naturally model language for your kiddos as you play! The learning that will happen during these play routines is magnified by the repetition that naturally happens as each character performs the sequence of activities!
2) Water Bin Car Wash
The Activity: Use favorite plastic car and truck toys to pretend your water bin is a car wash! You can make this as simple or as complex as you’d like by adding different features and extra steps in the play routine! Keep it simple by having cars get dirty in the grass or the mud and then washing them in the water bin, and drying them off with a towel or washcloth. If you want to add extra steps and some extra oomph to the activity, here are some fun add-ons for your car wash bin:Â
 Have kiddos make a pebble track for the cars to ‘race’ on before they go through the car wash!Â
Use a real sponge and some bubbles or kiddo-safe soap to wash the cars withÂ
Create a second dirty bin with some sensory mud to get the cars dirty
Create a paper tunnel by taping a piece of paper on top of either side of your bin so that cars can drive through the drive-through when getting washed in the water bin
The Language: Use the same tips from the imagination station activity to talk about the actions and concepts related to a car wash! Practice action words like ‘drive’, ‘stop’, ‘scrub’ etc. during each car’s trip through the car wash. Practice creating sentences with different concepts like dirty/clean or wet/dry and talk about the features of each car and how they are different or similar to the other cars going through the car wash!
3) Food & Free Play
The activity:Â This one has to be a favorite because it involves NO prep! Just add some containers, scoopers, and cups into your water bin and have your child practice scooping, pouring, and mixing! We love adding pretend food and toy animals to help with modeling of different action + object combinations (e.g., give the SOUP to the ELEPHANT; the LION is drinking lemonade etc.). Some play routine activities for this bin include creating different foods and drinks for each container and giving each food to the different animals!Â
The Language: Again, the possibilities are truly endless! For younger kiddos, you can practice modeling simple actions like ‘stir’ , ‘pour’, ‘scoop’, ‘splash’ and combinations like ‘splash + lion’! For older kiddos, you can practice having different animals request different food and drink items, or even practice following multiple step directions by making different foods and drinks for different animals or by using specific containers for specific foods! Some fun add-ons ideas that we love are:Â
Practice sentences and writing skills by creating a recipe book with different containers and play food items (e.g., red container + water + strawberry = strawberry cheesecake)...these can be so fun with silly combinations and it is a great way to practice category-based vocabulary, sentence skills, and descriptive concepts!Â
Use a separate bin for washing play dishes after the kiddos serve their guests- a bonus activity for the play routine!
Add fun textures and even more sensory experiences by adding ice cubes and pipettes to melt the ice cubes for the water recipes.
The possibilities for incorporating water play into play routines are truly endless! We hope these simple ideas help to boost fun and language learning for your kiddos this summer. If you have concerns about speech and language skills and are looking for more individualized support or feedback, we’d love to help! Feel free to reach out to us and book a free call here!
As a special bonus for our readers, we created a ‘sensory play & language modeling’ poster to end our sensory series. Use this poster as a reference for how to support language during play or even as decor to encourage open-ended sensory play!