Download a free 12-page EYFS sensory curriculum — all 7 areas of learning, 75+ activities across 5 support levels, Engagement Model built in. For early years SEND.
Get the full 12-page EYFS sensory curriculum free with your account — covering all 7 areas of learning, with 75+ activities across 5 support levels and the Engagement Model built in. A complete starting point for early years sensory and SEND provision.
Start with the free EYFS curriculum, then extend your whole setting with the KS1, KS2, SLD and neurodiverse frameworks when you're ready — one payment, all staff, free updates. Preview the samples before you decide anything.
During the early years foundation stage, young children learn about their environment primarily through tactile, visual, auditory, and physical exploration. Engaging in purposeful eyfs sensory activities is essential for building neural pathways, developing language, and refining motor coordination. Sensory experiences allow young learners to experiment with cause and effect, solve problems, and build spatial awareness. By integrating digital and physical sensory activities eyfs pupils can access at their own developmental pace, educators and parents create a rich foundation for future academic learning. These early experiences are particularly critical for children with identified special educational needs, helping them express choices and interact with others in a safe, structured, and highly encouraging manner that respects their early development.
To support early years educators and parents, Sensory Spark offers a comprehensive, FREE twelve-page EYFS curriculum. This curriculum covers seven key areas of learning, contains over seventy-five practical activities, and is structured across five developmental levels. By using this guide, teachers can easily plan sensory activities EYFS children will find accessible, engaging, and developmentally appropriate. Rather than relying on expensive materials, the curriculum focuses on accessible, low-cost activities that can be run with everyday classroom items. Whether tracking visual movements in our free Touch Garden game or exploring textures in physical sensory bins, this curriculum provides a clear, progressive pathway for every early years pupil, ensuring no child is excluded from early play and learning opportunities.
Early years sensory play is a vital tool for assessing and supporting learners who are pre-verbal or working below standard developmental milestones. Our free EYFS curriculum is aligned directly to the statutory Engagement Model, focusing on how children interact with their surroundings. Educators can observe how early years sensory play stimulates exploration, realisation, anticipation, persistence, and initiation. Tracking these five areas of engagement provides clear, qualitative evidence of learning and developmental progress. This approach ensures that every small step of a child's learning journey is recognised, valued, and built upon in future planning, without relying on standardized testing that may not reflect their true abilities, providing a robust framework for early years SENCOs and teachers.
A balanced early years environment combines tactile physical play with clean, accessible digital tools. Sensory Spark provides over thirty free sensory games, including Bubble Meadow, Music Board, Weather Maker, and Copy My Beat, which require no registration or signup. These digital resources can be paired with physical early years sensory play, such as water play, finger painting, or dough sculpting. This blended approach keeps children motivated while targeting multiple areas of development. For schools looking for more comprehensive systems, we offer a Key Stage 1 and 2 curriculum package for ninety-nine pounds, and premium apps for nine pounds ninety-nine per year. For details, please contact our support team at support@sensoryspark.co.uk.
Sensory play earns its place in a nursery or Reception setting when you can point at exactly which area of learning it serves — and well-planned provision does this naturally. A pouring and filling station with funnels, jugs and scoops delivers mathematics through capacity and counting. A scent-and-texture tray of herbs, pinecones and natural materials feeds understanding the world. Sensory stories — a simple narrative paired with props to touch, smell and hear — bring literacy alive for children who are not yet sitting through a whole book. Painting with hands, foam and oversized brushes supports expressive arts and design, while movement circuits build the gross motor foundations that come before fine motor control. The free 12-page EYFS curriculum maps more than 75 activities to all seven areas of learning, with five levels for each activity, so your planning shows both breadth and progression. Because every activity is pitched from the sensory-exploration level upward, the same provision includes children working at very early developmental stages without separate planning.
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The most useful early years sensory play is a single activity that every child in the group can access at their own level. Take water play. At the sensory-exploration level, the goal is simply tolerating and enjoying wet hands, with warm water and a towel within sight. One step up, the child fills and empties a container and watches the water reappear — cause and effect. Next comes a simple instruction — "give me the cup" — as objects are hidden in the water. Beyond that, the child counts how many scoops fill a bottle or sorts floating objects by colour, linking early mathematics. At the top level, the child predicts and tests — which container holds more, what happens when we add soap — and begins to make marks to record what they found. This is exactly how the free EYFS sensory curriculum is structured: five levels for each activity, so differentiation is built into the plan rather than improvised on the morning. Write the level, not just the activity, into your planning, and progress becomes visible across the term.
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For children with complex needs working at very early developmental levels, tick-box assessment rarely captures what is actually happening — but photographs, learning stories and careful observation do. The Engagement Model gives you a shared language for this: record what the child initiated, how long they persisted, what they explored, whether they anticipated a familiar routine, and the moments of realisation when their action changed something. Anchor your evidence in the sensory activities EYFS children return to again and again, because familiarity is where anticipation develops — the child who reaches for the jelly before it is offered, or laughs in the pause before the sensory story's silly bit. Keep each observation short and specific: "moved her hand to the texture board three times after a five-second pause" says more than a paragraph. The free curriculum on this page is written with the Engagement Model in mind, and the accompanying guide supports moderation conversations with colleagues and with parents, so everyone describes progress in the same terms.
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Creating a purposeful sensory environment is essential for supporting young children's development and exploration. By carefully selecting equipment and textures, you can transform any corner of your setting into a calming or stimulating space tailored to individual needs. Whether you are working with limited floor area or have a dedicated room available, thoughtful design makes a significant difference to how children engage with their surroundings. Explore our collection of practical layout concepts and equipment setups to help inspire your next classroom project.
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Sensory play is a fundamental part of the EYFS curriculum, helping young children make sense of the world through touch, sight, sound, and movement. By engaging their senses in structured and free-flow activities, children build essential cognitive connections and refine their fine motor skills. Our approach focuses on creating calm, curious environments where every child feels confident to investigate different textures and materials at their own pace, fostering a lifelong love for discovery and learning through meaningful play experiences.
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Email: support@sensoryspark.co.uk
Address: United Kingdom
Use the games alongside the curriculum activities: cause-and-effect games support early communication and attention, Sort It Out supports early sorting, and First-Then supports routines and transitions.
Yes. The 5 levels let you start where the child is rather than where their age suggests, and the Engagement Model link supports learners who are not yet engaged in subject-specific learning.
A free 12-page curriculum covering all 7 areas of learning, with more than 75 activities across 5 levels, linked to the Engagement Model so you can plan and record small steps of progress.