Skill
Explores Objects with the Senses
Child uses looking, touching, mouthing, and handling to learn the properties of objects and how they work.
Ages 4–30 months
Why it matters
Perception is how the brain turns raw sensation into understanding. As infants and toddlers feel textures, watch cause and effect, and combine what they see, hear, and touch, they build the mental models of objects and people that all later thinking and problem-solving rest on.
Builds toward this milestone
- uses perceptual information to understand objects, experiences, and interactions. — Head Start ELOF
What mastery looks like
- Explores an object by looking, touching, and handling it to learn how it feels.
- Notices differences in texture, weight, or sound and reacts to them.
- Adjusts how they handle a material based on its properties, such as pressing harder on stiff clay than on soft play dough.
How to observe it
- Does the infant turn an object over, mouth it, or pat it to find out what it is like?
- When given a new texture, does the child pause and change how they touch it?
Accessibility
- Offer high-contrast and lit objects for children with visual differences and objects with strong textures or sounds as alternate cues.
- Stabilize objects on a tray or in a bowl for children who cannot yet hold them.
Safety
- Use objects too large to swallow and free of small parts, since infants explore by mouthing.
Activities
Evidence
- Head Start Early Learning Outcomes Framework (ELOF) — U.S. Office of Head Start · 2015 · U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
Early Atlas