Messy play for Happy Children!

The many benefits of messy play and how it can make happy children!

I recently created an event at Fabrica Art Gallery in Brighton, to compliment their current theme of creativity and well-being. What better time to celebrate all of the amazing benefits that messy play can bring to children? The event certainly created a LOT of happy children as you will see from the photos!

Messy play gives children the opportunity to explore the world around them using all five of their senses. The children loved feeling the different textures with their hands and feet and mixing the different materials together to make ice creams and potions!

This activity is great for building up those hand, wrist and finger muscles that will be needed when children start to hold pens and pencils and learn to write. They had great fun picking up the spaghetti using the tongs and tweezers and snipping it with the scissors. We even put it on our heads to make spaghetti hair!!

Mark making is the first step towards writing when children start to scribble or make marks with their fingers in different ways. At Little Learners we teach the four pre-writing marks through our four fun characters – The Mark Makers. We learn to make straight lines, curved lines, circles and zig zags. These can be used to form all of the letters, numbers and shapes. We always have painting, drawing, chalks and whiteboards to create mark making opportunities as well as encouraging children to make their marks in the trays.

Our classes are always friendly, inclusive and welcoming. The children learn to be around other children, play alongside or with others of different ages and learn so many tricky social skills, like sharing and turn taking, in a safe and fun environment. They absolutely loved making their friendship pie, adding different ingredients to their play dough and rolling it out because happy activities mean happy children!

Sessions like these give children and their carers that little snippet of quality time together. I love to see parents and children talking about their play, using different vocabulary to describe what they are doing and having fun together! This kind of activity is great for fine motor control too!

Finally ….. The most important benefit of all, is that Little Learners classes are so much FUN and we smile A LOT! The children don’t even realise the other learning benefits that are so carefully planned out through each activity because they are having so much fun! Additionally happy children learn quicker and have the biggest smiles!

Where you can find Little Learners Lewes & Brighton…

You will find me at Fabrica Art Gallery in central Brighton once a month on a Wednesday. June and July sessions are filling fast so don’t delay if you’d like to join us. I also run weekly classes in Uckfield and Brighton – check all those out here – www.littlelearnersuk.com/franchise/lewes-brighton

If you are in another area of the country check out your nearest class here – https://troyoverend.com/book-a-messy-play-class/

Kate x