Water Creatures- Sensory Bin

 I was so excited about this sensory bin because 1) I had all the materials on hand (!!) and 2) I knew that E would love it!  So, I made it a few days before getting it out for E.  The fillers in this bin include:  blue colored rice, sea shells, sea shell shaped pasta, and rocks.  Utensils include: a magnifying glass, tongs, a shovel, and a funnel.  Other items include some sand paper, blue felt, big leaves, and plastic sea creatures.  And, my favorite part of the sensory bin, the water bag.  I was so excited about this part!!!  I put water in a big freezer baggie, then put on another baggie just to be safe.  Sadly, if you look closely at picture above, you can see that there was a little problem with leaking....

 This picture shows the bin without the water :(.  Not sure what I would need to do differently to make it work.

 E never knew that the water part was in the bin, so she enjoyed the bin just the same.  Her favorite part was digging in the rice using the shells, and she loved hiding the sea creatures.  As always, this sensory bin was a hit that filled a lot of time!  

Bugs- Sensory Bin

 To get excited about studying bugs, I created a new sensory bin representing a word we have been spending a lot of time talking about-- habitat.  The fillers in this bin include two one foot squares of fake grass (I found it on clearance at Hobby Lobby with the Easter items), pebbles, and green poly fill.

 I included two plastic posts which I filled with a coffee bean/split pea/colored spaghetti mix left over from another sensory bin.  I then cut apart a silk flower bush and a silk leaf bush and "planted" them into the pots. Utensils include tongs, magnifying glasses, and a cardboard tube.  Finally, I added a couple of bags of bugs from the dollar store, along with some self-stick ladybugs and spider confetti.  

 As soon as we opened the bin, E wanted her bug viewing container to collect the bugs from the bin. Her favorite was finding the little lady bugs, which I had placed "crawling" in different spots throughout the bin.

 Here she is counting some of the bugs before placing them into her viewing container.

And here she is making the ladybugs crawl on her feet!  Looks like she needed a pedicure!


I just can't emphasize how great these bins are.  They are fun to put together, a great way to learn, and very entertaining!

Birthday Week- Sensory Bin

This week is birthday week at our house, with two members of our household celebrating birthdays. Birthday week includes a birthday play date with some of E's friends, our core family celbrations and gift giving, and family coming in from out of town. All of that adds up to me needing a good sensory bin to distract E while I am baking cakes, cooking, cleaning, and decorating the house. This bin is filled with white beans, pink rice, lots of balloons, marbles, and some of those noise makers as fillers. Utensils include tongs, cupcake wrappers, a new front loader truck, a magnifying glass, and a couple of different sizes of cardboard tubes. Other items include birthday candles, and the blue birthday garland. With the balloons and noisemakers, I will have to really reiterate the sensory bin rule that we don't put anything in our mouths. I can't wait for her to dig in...she simply loves these things!

Springtime- Sensory Bin

Over the last couple of weeks, our family has been hit with a few minor illnesses that have lead to a lot of the activities I had planned to finish up The Five Senses Unit on tbeing left on the back burner. And, I realized that I am ready to move on and not try to finish them up, so today, I jumped in with two feet to some prep and activities for our next unit, Springtime! Our weather is supposed to be in the 70s and 80s all week, so I am afraid if I put this off too long, I won't be able to actually do the spring activities I want to do in conjunction with this unit such as planting our seedlings for our garden plants, scouting bird nests, paying attention to the return of the bugs, turtles, and other lifeforms absent from the winter, watching the yards and trees green up, etc.

For this sensory bin, I have focused on the idea of planting. The items include: dried split peas, green pasta tubes, green pasta sticks, mini decorator balls covered with moss (all of these items are to represent the greening up of the outdoors), tan felt, coffee beans (to represent dirt), sunflower seeds (to plant), a watering can filled with blue ribbon pieces, a fork and spoon for digging, candy flowers (that E does not know are candy) a magnifying class, a funnel, an embroidery hoop, and a few containers. I can't wait for her to get to play with it!

The Five Senses- Sensory Bin

My goal for this sensory bin is to appeal to as many of the senses as possible, which I think this one does. If you are unfamiliar with sensory bins, please check out my first post on sensory bins that gives a little more background.


The main fillers in the this bin include small pieces of spaghetti colored green, a silk square, unrolled toilet paper, coffee beans, and river rocks. Some of the untensils and containers include a spoon, turner/tongs, an old spice container (still smelling of cumin), tongue depressors, pipe curve, a cup, coffee filter, clothes pins, a small Ziploc container, and a carboard box. Other items in the bin include foam balls, a car, rubber bands, sandpaper, and pieces of yarn.

The two most popular items in this bin are definitely the hand warmer and the reusable ice cubes. E spent a lot of time trying to warm up and cool down the other items in the bin. She wanted me to sit down to play, and I did some things she hadn't come up with like putting the spaghetti pieces into the foam balls, "drawing" with the yarn on the sandpaper, making hats with the toilet paper, etc. I can't wait to get it out again to see what she comes up with!

Exploring Valentine's Day and Emotions- Sensory Bin

Sensory bin is a term I never heard until a few weeks ago, and now, I am planning about five or six of them in my head for the next units we are going to do. You can find hundreds of resources on line for sensory bins, and I have read through the majority of those. The main points of what I learned are that a sensory bin should be a self-contained area for a child who has outgrown the need to put every object in his or her mouth to have free play focusing on textures, fine-motor skills, exploration of objects, and being creative.




When I went to initially pick out our bin, I wanted something relatively large, so I went with the lidded Sterilite 35 quart container. I'm not a huge fan of messes or messy things, so I knew there would need to be a balance between having interesting contents and being able to clean them up quickly and easily. As many of the internet resources suggest, I put down a large tablecloth under the bin to easily gather the small pieces (in this case rice and beans) that fall on the floor. So, if you don't' have a tarp, blanket, or table cloth to use under your bin, be sure to pick one up.




When I went out shopping for the contents of the bin, I knew lots of people use fillers like beans and rice as the base, then add in objects from there. I wanted this bin to be Valentine's day colors, so I used dried white beans (2 medium bags), rice my daughter helped me color pink (take 4 cups of rice, a tablespoon of rubbing alcohol, and food coloring-- mix in a large bowl or bag, then lay out to dry overnight on a foil covered cookie sheet). I plan to save and eventually reuse these filler items.




I also wanted to gather an assortment of "tools" for the bins. For this bin I purchased tweezers, tongs, magnifying glasses, and pieces of PVC pipe which will be kept to be used only for these sensory bins. I don't want to have an eyebrow emergency and have to go digging through rice to find my tweezers, so I spent the dollar for E to have her own! Also, I probably won't let her play with these items outside of the bins to keep them fun and fresh when she does get bin time.





Here is what the bin looked like preplay! Other items include plastic heart ornaments and the plastic bottom they came in, a shoelace, a feather rose, a heart-shaped touch light, an empty salt shaker, a potato masher, red metallic fill, a pink ball, conversation hearts (she doesn't know they are edible, so they worked out just fine as a toy...if she finds out they are candy, I will probably have to take them out) in a pink plastic container, white silk flower pedals, and a mouse that says phrases about how much he likes you.

Before allowing E to start playing, I set two ground rules: 1) All items need to stay in the bin or on the tablecloth, and 2) Nothing from the bin goes into your mouth. I turned her loose, sitting on the ground with her for about the first 10 minutes. She asked a lot of "what is this for" questions, to which I would give answers such as, "This is what I can think of to do with it. What can you think of?" I then went to work on other things for a while and allowed her to keep playing. I liked how she came up with ideas for the object I never did (used the rose as a bean stirrer). I loved that aspect of this bin!

The only rule we may need to add for the next bin (depending on the contents) is that feet do not go in the bin. E wanted to step into the bin to see how the rice and beans felt on her feet, and I allowed it. She loved having her toes buried in the filler and wiggling them out.

Since I initially put the bin out for E, she has asked to play with it numerous times. I can't wait to plan and introduce the next bin!