Sensory Bins – Page 4 – Butterbees and Bumbleflies

The gift that keeps on giving!

Back on August 4th, I told you about our Farmer’s Market sorting set (this one: Learning Resources Farmers Market Color Sorting Set– affiliate link, thank you!), and how much Becca enjoys it. I talked about all the fabulous ways you could use the set for teaching math skills, etc. It really is a fabulous set.

But today, I wanted to shine the spotlight on Mr. Grayson. You see, he’s learning how to pick things up, and how to drop them, and how to put them in his mouth… and once again, I’m impressed with the versatility of this set! Because it’s fabulous for him, at 5 1/2 months, just as much as it’s fabulous for his big sister at 2!

I love that the fruits and veggies are bright colors and have a variety of textures, so he’s getting a great sensory experience while playing with them. And I love that they are big enough to really work his motor skills as well as his hand-eye coordination – while being safe… he isn’t going to choke on any of these items. Sister also loves to play WITH him – she will bring him the right color bucket and help him drop them in! She is also great about picking up the ones he drops on the floor (because that happens a lot)!

The manufacturer recommends this product for 36 months- 6 years. But I would definitely say that if you’re looking for a Christmas gift that’s gonna just keep on giving, this is it – for any age of baby, toddler, or preschooler. Granted, he doesn’t have any teeth yet – and I don’t know what will happen once he does and tries to chew on these, but they feel firm enough that I doubt he’ll be able to really take a bite out of any of these items. (We’ll watch him close, though, and I’d of course recommend you do the same if you have a little one who will be playing with them.)

So there you go – a gift perfect for the little kiddos in your life – because they will never stop learning, imagining, and loving this set!

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Pumpkin/Halloween Center

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A few weeks ago, I posted about play with orange colored rice. (Here’s that post) And then a few days after that, I took the purple rice I had, and added lavender essential oil. I’ve heard that it has calming properties, and thought – what better thing to add to Becca’s rice? Well, so I added a couple drops too many and the whole house smelled like lavender for two days. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.. just unexpected. To try and combat the strong lavender scent, I mixed the purple rice with the orange, and then let it sit for about a week or maybe even two before we used it. Now, it has a nice lavender scent, but isn’t overwhelming.

I love our water table – such versatility. You can get yours here (aff link). It works great for centers like this because I can fit several activities on the different layers.

I will give a qualifying statement to this post – like I did on my Apple Theme Center – if you are just starting to do sensory activities with your kids, you might not want to take the time or have the energy to put together an entire theme center. THAT IS OK!!! Just pick one or two of these and start there! 🙂

So here’s the big picture – the overview of everything. This center has a high emphasis on math and art, where my Apple center was a combination of Language Arts and Math concepts.

First we’ll look at that sensory rice. Isn’t it pretty? And it fit so well in the top of the water table. I added some fall cookie cutters – they are super fun to sink down and bury in the rice – as well as a variety of sizes of pumpkins that I had collected the past couple of years at Dollar Tree. She definitely likes the cookie cutters the best. She likes to hide them and then dig around to try and find them.

Another fun activity is the pumpkin coloring activity. We went to Michaels and picked up a white craft pumpkin, and I actually introduced this activity with her BEFORE putting it in the center. We talked about how this pumpkin is MADE for coloring, and remembered that other pumpkins we have around the house that are decorations were NOT made for coloring. We also remembered that crayons are only for coloring on paper (and this pumpkin) – not on the table, the couch, the hearth, or any other surface. So I felt confident that I could put this activity in the pumpkin center and allow her to pull it out and take it anywhere to color, without getting crayon everywhere. So far, she has done great with it, and will occasionally just go grab it and go to town coloring! It’s really starting to look cool, and she can definitely take ownership of this and next week, I’ll let her select where she wants to put it to decorate our home!

I also gave her a little pumpkin ice cube tray that I had bought at Dollar Tree – and I added the numbers 2, 4, 6, 8, 10 to reinforce counting by twos. My thought was that she could put one little pumpkin in each space, and count them by twos. She had another idea all together – which reinforces the differences in the way she thinks vs the way I think… and makes me glad I didn’t limit her thinking by telling her what to do with it. She put two grains of rice in each pumpkin on either side of the two, four by the four, six by the six, and up. She actually sat there and counted out ten grains of rice two different times to fill up the “10” pumpkins. Not quite the skill I was hoping to cover, but she kept saying 2,4,6,8,10, so it did end up reinforcing the skill after all.

In addition, I gave her a mesh bag that she could practice putting her pumpkins into (for a gross motor skill of holding a bag open and coordinating the drop to put them in), along with these little black bags for sorting (definitely a much more fine motor skill – these bags are LITTLE). I got this “fall scatter” (shown below) at Michaels for super cheap. She had fun sorting them by color and shape, holding them up to the lights to look through them, and of course, making patterns. (Note: we ended up having to put the acorns away because she kept wanting to pretend she was a squirrel and put the acorns in her mouth, which is of course not safe. She hasn’t done that with the pumpkins. Not sure what it was about the acorns – other than her desire to be a squirrel…)

We also used the cookie cutters, plastic pumpkins, and pumpkin scatter to sort small, medium, and large, and talk about “big, bigger, biggest” and “small, smaller, smallest.” She informed me that NONE of the pumpkins were big, so it wasn’t correct to use those words about these teeny pumpkins, so then we said they were “teeny, teenier, and teeniest.” That was super funny, and giggles ensued.

Sticky Football Field

As you know, I’m always looking for ways to make Sunday afternoon football games more interactive for Becca – since she’s not as interested in staring at the screen as we are! So, in my ever-continuing love of all things contact paper, and knowing how much she loves putting her hands on the sticky tree we made, I thought – why not let her walk on it?

Here’s what I did – I printed off two end zone signs for our favorite team (#WEARETEXANS), and printed off the sideline numbers (you could easily print them for both sides – I just did one). I laid out the contact paper on the floor, and taped it down with painter’s tape (don’t use masking or you’ll leave residue on your floor!). Then I laid down one end zone sign, and Becca placed the other. I put down the 10 and 30, she put down the 20. I put down the 50, she put down the 40. Until all the numbers were down. Then we counted them by 10s. Then, we ripped green paper for grass, and sprinkled them all over the “field”, and she began to walk on it. She LOVES the stickiness on her feet! She says it feels cool. It’s also super fun to run cars on because they make a great sound, and she loves to roll the football across it because that makes yet another cool sound!

You could also extend this by cutting yard lines, and putting a center logo on the field. We just didn’t do that this time. 🙂

Total Prep Time for Mommy: About 10 minutes – since I had to type up the yard line numbers, and print out end zone logos.

Total Play Time for Becca: About 20 minutes at a time every day, all week. Very worthwhile activity! She has been recognizing the numbers and counting all week, too. 🙂 Sneaky mommy.

Fall Tree Activities

There are a ton of fabulous fall tree activities out there, but I’ve really been striving to be somewhat original in my activities. All of my ideas are of course spurred from something I’ve seen online, and in no way am I saying I’m the first to ever do these this exact way… because I’m sure I’m not. But here are three activities we’ve done in the past couple weeks to create fall trees different ways, modifying someone else’s ideas.

I’m loving contact paper activities. I saw this post from Allison over at No Time for Flashcards, and it really got me thinking. One of the fine motor activities I haven’t really done with Becca is paper tearing. So, I gathered three sheets of construction paper – one each of red, yellow, and orange, and I did something I’m horrible at… I drew a tree on contact paper. (Draw it on the non-sticky side.) Then, I got out my painter’s tape and taped it – sticky side out – to one of our back door windows. And I taught Becca how to tear paper! We had a blast tearing our paper leaves, and sticking them on the tree. And, I left the paper where she could access it throughout the past couple weeks, and she has added more leaves as time has gone by. Despite my disdain for my drawing abilities, she immediately knew it was a tree, and has been very proud of her fall tree! So, I count this one as a success!

I love buttons. Like seriously LOVE buttons. As a kid, I loved going over to my Grandma’s house, pulling out her button drawer, and playing with all the buttons – sorting them, stacking them, whatever. Just digging my hands into them. I guess it was my very own “sensory bin” back before that was even a term. HA! The cool thing is that I now have a button box – that includes all of Grandma’s buttons, all of Cody’s Mima’s buttons from her sewing table, and quite a few new buttons that I’ve added myself. It’s an awesome resource, and a ton of fun! So I saw this post from Maggy at Red Ted Art, and it got me thinking – I could create a button tree with Becca that was specifically fall! So, I found a tree clipart online (after having learned my lesson on the contact paper tree… Mommy can do lots of things, but drawing just ain’t one of them!), and printed it on some beautiful textured blue card stock. (Want your own tree? Get the free printable here! I simply typed “winter tree clipart” in Google and found this tree from ClipartBest.com and made it fit like I wanted on my document… I’m saving you the work!) And after the tree was printed, we sifted through the button box, found some fabulous buttons, and then set to work. Becca placed each button where she wanted it, and I used the hot glue gun to stick them down. We had some serious fun making this tree, and I think it turned out simply beautiful. She is so proud of her button tree!

I knew I was going to do this post, so I stretched myself, and said, ok what’s at least one more way I can do a fall tree? I had to dig deep for this one. But, I used what we had laying around – tops to Becca’s favorite applesauce pouches (thank you, HEB!) and decided to work on her random number matching skills. The girl can count – like mad. But sometimes just seeing a number (beyond ten), recognizing it, and then being able to match it to itself out of order… well, that’s still a little rusty. So here’s what I did. I drew on a large sheet of construction paper (again, apology for my lack of drawing skills, but she knew it was a tree, so who cares?) a tree, and then traced around a pouch cap to be sure my circles were the right size. I covered the whole sheet in contact paper since laminating and using twenty mins later wasn’t an option… Then I labeled each pouch cap with a number, and colored the circles on the tree random colors… and labeled them with numbers as well. It helps a little because they aren’t all one color, so she knows that the orange ones on the paper will be from the peach applesauce pouches, and the red ones on the paper will be from the plain applesauce pouches – so it helps her check the numbers and make sure she’s on the right track. She keeps going back to this activity and pulling out new numbers. I’ve found that she likes to start the activity in the morning before we go anywhere – she’ll place one or two pouch caps – and then later in the day she’ll place three or four more, come back later and place a couple more… she just doesn’t have the energy or patience to do all twenty of them at one time. Which is fine with me. I plan to stick these pouch caps in a bag, and pull this back out next fall – when she should be able to do all of them in one setting.

Halloween Sensory Gel Bag

Becca loves sensory gel bags… and they are super easy to make!!

You’ll need:
a strong freezer bag (quart size is perfect)
clear book/box tape
clear hair gel – clear works best for this b/c you’re going to be adding your own color… I found a great big bottle at Dollar Tree and used the entire bottle in this bag.
food coloring
stuff to go in it – So I made mine orange, and just used a bunch of sparkly black sequins I had – to make it sort of Halloween-ish. I saw an idea online that used google-eyes of various sizes. Or, you could get a bunch of little spiders (I saw them at Dollar Tree) to put inside, or leaf confetti (also at Dollar Tree) if you wanted to make it fall, but NOT Halloween. So there’s lot of fun options!

Make sure before you put ANYTHING inside that you secure all three closed sides with book tape to prevent little holes and leaks. Then, fill with your gel, food coloring, and stuff. Squeeze as much air out as possible, and zip closed, then fold the top down and secure with more tape.

Becca has been enjoying hers not only for picking up and squishing, but also for viewing on her light box! And how awesome does it look with the light shining thru?