Easy Baby Sensory Play Area Ideas

Now that my youngest (age 6 months) is crawling all over the place we are trying to find activities for her to do that keep her out of trouble and engage her senses. We are also rapidly baby proofing our house since she seems to get into more than some of my others kids. Earlier this week we created a simple sparkly squish bag for babies. It was adorable to see how much she liked it.

We've also been creating an easy baby sensory play area using some of our favorite tips and ideas from our Baby Play pinterest board. This post shares some of our favorite ideas so that you can create your own easy baby sensory play area.

One of my favorite things to add to a baby play area, especially for a crawler, is a tunnel.

We absolutely love the (affiliate link) Sunny Patch Happy Giddy caterpillar tunnel from Melissa & Doug Toys. The material is silky and soft and makes great sounds when my daughter scratches the tunnel with her fingers. She loves to go inside and rub and rub it!

Next we created a sensory box. We learned about sensory boxes from Meri Cherry Blog. You can see a variety of the different types of cardboard sensory boxes over at Meri Cherry Blog.

We used short pieces of ribbon (under 8 inches) and heavy duty tape to create a ribbon box. Inside our box we added a few textured items, like cardboard pieces with yarn shapes hot glued onto them and large carpet square pieces.

My little one loved crawling in and out and in out.

We also created a textured path using old pieces of carpet. Make sure if you make one of these you secure the carpet in place. We didn't the first few times and it made the baby slide all over the place (which was a great workout, but made her mad).

I plan on adding a Baby Touch and Feel Board within the next week. You can find the details over on Happily Ever Mom.

I am also creating a simple and more generic touch and feel board (like this sensory board I made for Christmas) to go inside the sensory box.

Sensory play helps babies build vocabulary and understand language which is one reason why it is so important. It also helps them learn about their world and test out new sights, textures, sounds, and smells. You can learn more about why sensory play is important for babies here at PBS Parents.

My baby sensory play area is going to be ever-changing since there are so many fun ideas to try.

Here are a few others baby sensory play ideas that I have been incorporating into mine:

Embroidery Hoop Wall Sensory Boards by Fun at Home with Kids

Make a Baby Play Station by Kids Activities Blog

DIY Tug Box by Laughing Kids Learn

Create some Texture Eggs (or other shapes) by Two-Daloo 

Do you have any other ideas you think I should include? Have you ever created a baby sensory play area?