Fox Tale Soup Storytelling Bin

My daughter and I have been having lots of fun this past week reading Fox Tale Soup. It's a retelling of the classic tale, Stone Soup. The animal characters in it make it very appealing to preschool age children. It's been quite a long time since we made a sensory bin, so since my daughter enjoyed this story so much, I decided to put together a Fox Tale Soup Storytelling Bin for her to have fun re-telling the story and have free play with all of the materials.

Fizzy Dough Alphabet Ocean Hunt

Welcome to another edition of the 12 Months of Sensory Dough Series. This month is all about Fizzy Dough. Do I dare say this has been our most favorite month so far? Gasp! We seriously loved it! We combined a fabulous Small World Fizzy Dough activity found at Fun at Home with Kids together with an alphabet hunt and had such a great afternoon of fun and learning! 

14 Small World Sensory Play Activities for Kids

This post is part of the Hop for Hope in support of my dear friend, Heather from Crayon Box Chronicles. Heather's newborn daughter Savannah is fighting eagerly for her life. I would love for you to stop by the Hop for Hope page to come learn more about Savannah and her condition and find out simple ways you can help my friend Heather and her family during this difficult time. 

Easter Egg Sensory Play and Learning

I put together an Easter Egg Sensory Bin for my daughter last week and it was a hit! We are still working on recognizing our numbers so I decided to incorporate some learning in the bin with number and color matching.  

Coffee Beans "Space" Sensory Bin + 40 Days of Sensory Bin Fillers

I love the smell of coffee beans! Their rich, deep, flavorful scent makes them such a perfect sensory material. Something about their dark brown color reminded me of the darkness of Outer Space so I rolled with that idea and as my contribution to the 40 Days of Sensory Bins Series at Little Bins for Little Hands I made this Coffee Beans Space Sensory Bin.  

St. Patrick's Day Sensory Bin

We have been doing all things rainbows and St. Patrick's Day this past week so it was perfect timing to get our bin out and put together a St. Patrick's Day Sensory Bin for my daughter.  

The Day It Rained Hearts Sensory Bin

I put together this Sensory Bin for my daughter to go along with our favorite Valentine's Day book, "The Day It Rained Hearts" by Felicia Bond.  I wanted the hearts to lay on the ground as if they had rained just like in the story but also wanted them displayed on trees like in the end of the story. I am happy with how the sensory bin turned out.

Kids Blogger Network Best of 2013 Blog Hop

Below you'll find over 50 Kid Blogger Network members coming together for The Kids Blogger Network Best of 2013 Blog Hop. We know you'll find tons of wonderful ideas to browse, pin and share. We'd love for you to join the blog hop and share your favorite activity of 2013 too, and make sure you're following the Kid Blogger Network on Pinterest where you can find all of these great ideas.

New Year's Gold Glitter Play Dough Invitation to Play

Like most children, my kids love play dough! It's one of those activities that holds their attention all afternoon, not to mention that it's a great sensory activity and one that sparks a child's imagination and creativity. If you are on the look out for the perfect New Year's Eve activity for kids I have the perfect thing! This New Year's gold glitter play dough was a big hit with my kids. I combined the play dough in a tray with different colorful and sparkly items and numbers which made a great invitation for my children to play with the dough. 

"Acorns Everywhere" Sensory Bin

I was super excited to pick up Kevin Sherry's book "Acorns Everywhere" from the library because I had a sensory bin already in mind for my daughter to go along with it. It's a really simple book, perfect for toddlers and preschoolers. A squirrel is frantically hiding acorns for the Winter and tries to get other animals to help him collect and hide them as well. Suddenly he realizes he is hungry but he can't remember where he hid all of his acorns. What is he to do??

I used split peas for my base and since I don't live near any acorn trees, I purchased a couple packages of fake acorns from the Target dollar section. I put a metal container in the bin with some tongs and a scoop for play and I also printed out a couple squirrel clipart images from clker.com and attached them to empty toilet paper rolls.

After reading the book, but before my daughter played with the sensory bin, I hid all the acorns down inside the peas to tie the bin in with the book. I wanted her to be able to dig in and find all the hidden acorns.

My daughter dug right in. She loved finding all the hidden acorns and putting them in the metal container. We practiced counting all the acorns after she had found them and then I just set her loose to play as she chose. 

The little squirrels ended up being an awesome play element in the bin. I was so happy that I included two in the bin.

Looking for more sensory bins?

Thanksgiving Turkey Sensory Bin (Invitation to Play)

It's been a couple weeks since I switched out our sensory bin so I decided it was about time I got back on track. This time we decided to play with turkeys.

I went to Dollar Tree yesterday with a couple things on my list and when I walked in the door these adorable solar powered turkey's were flapping their wings and nodding their heads at me. I couldn't resist them! My kids loved them too! After brainstorming some ideas with my 3rd grader (please tell me you do this too) our turkey sensory bin was born.

I put them in a base of oatmeal and used our Lincoln Logs to build a turkey coop for them. We used empty fruit containers as their feed bins with yellow opaque beads from our friends at Craftprojectideas.com as our turkey feed. You can pick up the opaque beads in a pack with several colors at your local Walmart. I included a small pair of tongs for removing the turkey feed in our bin also.

Before I set it all up, we had the turkeys sitting in the window seal all morning with the morning sun to get them charged so they moved while my daughter played with them. You can't see them move in the pictures obviously but seriously, it's so cute!

My daughter had fun feeding the turkeys and practiced removing all the feed back out of the coop. She built a whole new coop for them a bunch of different ways and played pretend with the turkeys. My kids ended up naming the turkeys Tom, Tucker and Teresa and they are sitting back in the window seal waiting for the morning sun tomorrow again.

The sensory bin ended up looking like a big old mess when she was done playing with it. I call that a SUCCESS!!  :)

Click HERE to check out more of our Sensory Bin Activities.

 

*I received my opaque beads free of charge from Craftprojectideas.com. All opinions expressed are 100% my own.

Fall Tree Play Dough (Invitation to Play)

I was at Michael's last week and came across this fun package of Table Scatter plastic leaves. I didn't know what I was going to do with them but I grabbed two packs and came home as giddy as could be.

We had a rainy inside day yesterday so I pulled them out and decided to whip up some brown homemade play dough and invite the kids to play.

I love that play dough is fun for all ages and makes such a great family activity! My 8 and 6 year old boys had even more fun with this activity than my toddler did. We all came up with our own creative way of making a fall tree out of our play dough and table scatter leaves.

These table scatter leaves have turned out to be so much fun! Definitely an awesome find! Stop by on Monday for a fun leave pattern printable.  :)

Pumpkin Guts Sensory Play

We are continuing our pumpkin/fall theme this week in preschool and are learning about the life cycle of a pumpkin. The perfect book to go along with this theme is Pumpkin Jack by Will Hubbell (affiliate link). It is a cute book about a boy who in the course of one year, watches as his jack-o-lantern, Jack, decomposes, sprouts and finally produces more pumpkins in time for Fall. Since the weather isn't quite cold enough to carve pumpkins yet, we explored the inside of a pumpkin through sensory play with a Pumpkin Guts Sensory Bin.

Pumpkin Pattern Worksheet (for Sensory Bin)

As promised, I have a Pumpkin Pattern Worksheet to go along with my Five Little Pumpkins Sensory Bin. It's tested and approved by my cute little girl.

Click HERE to get it in PDF version, or you can also get it in JPEG version HERE and just print it as a whole page.

*The pumpkin clipart used in the worksheet came from SweetClipart.com  

You can leave the pattern worksheet as a whole page or cut it in four different strips. We are just starting to learn about patterns so I didn't want her to get overwhelmed with looking at the whole page of different patterns so I cut mine into four different strips. It worked perfectly for her.  

As you can see I just set the sensory bin next to her so she could get out all pumpkins and vines by herself. We are just storing the 4 pattern strips in the pumpkin sensory bin so they'll be there for her to use whenever we get it out this week.

  In case you missed my Five Little Pumpkins Sensory Bin post, you can see it HERE.

  I will have more pumpkin pattern fun coming up this week so make sure to check back! :)  

Five Little Pumpkins Sensory Bin

We traded in our apple books for pumpkin books at the library this week so I switched out our Apple Sensory Bin for Five Little Pumpkins. My daughter could not wait to get her hands on it.

  {This post contains affiliate links, read our Disclosure Policy for more information.}

How we put together our bin:

We kept our black bean base that we already had in the bin from our Apple Tree theme last week, so that made the transition really simple.

To keep with the Five Little Pumpkins theme, I placed five little pumpkin containers on a gate or fence. I found my little pumpkins at Walmart, but here are some on Amazon that look the same. For the fence I used some of our wooden blocks.

 

I made a pumpkin patch in the remaining section of the bin using orange poms and green sparkly pipe cleaners.

 

Fold the ends of the pipe cleaners down so the sharp ends aren't exposed and curl them around your finger. I placed them around the bin as vines and put the poms around them. I chose to use 25 orange poms because as part of our play this week, I am going to challenge her to put 5 poms in every pumpkin bin to practice counting objects to 5. Add some tongs and a scoop and your little one is all ready to dig in.

 

 

Your little one  can practice moving the pumpkin poms into the bigger pumpkin containers.

They can use the scoop to practice filling the pumpkins with the black beans.

They can build a tall tower with their blocks to see how high they can get a pumpkin.

And smile and laugh when it all comes tumbling down.

Or you can work on patterns with the pumpkin poms and vines.

**Go HERE for our Pumpkin Pattern Printable**

  Pair this sensory bin with Five Little Pumpkins by Iris Van Rynback .

It's a pretty popular Halloween story that is the well-known Five Little Pumpkins rhyming finger play in story version.

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