One of our favorite activities to use in therapy, especially Occupational Therapy, is sensory bins! These are fun and easy ways to encourage your child to engage their senses, develop fine motor skills, practicing skills like sorting/counting, facilitate language opportunities, encourage play skills, and have fun! For some kiddos sensory bins can also be a very calming activity and one that can help to facilitate attention.
How to make a sensory bin?
– Filling up a storage bin with various items of different textures.
– You want a base item generally for your child to manipulate, which can be fun for children to hide other items and scoop into various containers.
What can you use as a base?
– uncooked beans, uncooked rice or pasta (which can be dyed any color), sand, kinetic sand, rocks, aquarium pebbles, popcorn kernels, pumpkin seeds, water beads, cooked spaghetti, spider webbing, jello, water, etc.
What can you include?
– leaves, candy corn, toy pumpkins, animal figurines, gel stickers, cotton balls, plastic spiders, eyeball balls, letters or shapes, googley eyes, pipe cleaners, candy, glow sticks, etc.
– A lot of these items can be found at your local dollar store!
– Increase the fun by including items with various textures!
What can be used to navigate the sensory bin contents?
– Hands! But be aware that some children are sensitive to certain textures.
– Shovels, spoons, measuring cups, cups, bowls, ice cream scoopers, silicone cupcake cups, tweezers, small kitchen tongs, bubbletongs, toy skeleton hands, etc.
Some activities to try with sensory bins!
– Hiding and finding items
– Sorting items by color, type, etc.
– Matching items to a picture (there are fun printable worksheets you can find online)
– encourage pre-writing and handwriting in various textures
– putting items into other containers, such as cups, bowls, ice cube trays, etc.
Fall Sensory Bin Ideas