Easter Dollar Tree Sensory Bin

Another holiday. Another Dollar Tree sensory bin. This Easter themed sensory bin is super easy and can be adapted to meet the needs of your kids. Easter grass in a variety of colors and textures is great for filling sensory bins any time of the year. You better believe I grabbed up a bunch of every color and kind to help last the year. And the best part is that Easter grass is reusable so I can just bag it back up and use it again next year or for another theme. Win Win.

We originally did this bin when Little Miss was 12 months old. Now that Little Man is in the stage that he loves sensory bins, we got to bring this easy and cheap bin out for round two and even set up another one for Little Miss at age 3. Both kids had an absolute blast playing in their bins.

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When Little Miss originally completed this bin it included some yellow and pink sparkly and shiny Easter grass, some spring cookie cutters from this Wilton Cookie Cutter set, and some Easter eggs.

Here is a look into how Little Miss explored her bin at 12 months old.

She immediately went for the eggs and was in love with how they opened and closed. She is very interested in opening and closing everything that will open and close so these eggs were perfect for he because they had a hinge that kept them together.

She is also very into transferring things from one spot to another and creating piles and then moving them all back again and she enjoyed being able to do that with the eggs and the Easter grass. It was funny to watch her with the grass though because it was very static clingy so it wouldn’t come off of her no matter how much she tried. She was dragging it everywhere with her and towards the end got quite frustrated that her efforts to get it off were failing.

I always let her explore her bins for a while by herself, letting her touch and feel and play with all the materials. Then after a while I will talk to her about each of the things she is picking up. This sensory bin allowed us to talk about how the eggs were hard plastic and different pastel colors, how the eggs opened and closed and how you could stick things inside them, how the pink and yellow Easter grass were sparkly and shiny, and how it formed static and clung to us. With her love of transferring we talk heavily about how she is taking things OUT of the bin and putting them ON the floor and then she takes things OFF the floor and puts them IN the bin. She definitely understands the word IN and will place items in something almost immediately after we ask her too.  She also enjoyed chasing the eggs as they rolled away from her. She would try to catch them and sometimes end up hitting them further away and would continue chasing after them until she got them.

Here is how the kids explored the bin round #2:

Instead of cookie cutters our second go of this bin, I added these adorable chick and carrot containers from the Dollar Tree and they were the perfect addition and were opened and closed and filled up no short of a hundred times.

While Little Man had the Easter Grass and eggs in his bin, Little Miss had a “bunny tails” aka cotton balls, eggs and containers bin for her exploring. It was quickly obvious that separating the two was more a waste of time (hence my lack of the bins separately), because they two of them decided combining them was way more fun and they even took it one step further and decided to create a sensory floor. Who needs bins right?

Watching them explore the sensory bins was so fun. Little Man aka destructor, quickly tried tearing apart the Easter grass and quickly learned that trying to do so made a squeaky noise so he continued trying to make the noise. It was fascinating to watch him manipulate the tiny piece of grass in different ways to produce the same effect.

What I LOVE about these sensory bins:

-It was cheap. Less than 7 dollars total for the two bins.

-The materials can be stored away and saved for future bins and projects making the cost of the bin go down even more when you look at it per time being explored.

-The talking points just with these bins and the sensory experiences they had were too many to count.

-They expressed their personalities in their own way and I was able to watch and learn how they learn just by watching them explore.

-She was able to express her love of transferring and opening and closing things all in the same bin, while Little Man expressed his love of “destruction”. I believe strongly in following the child and giving them activities that they are interested in and this one did just that for both of them at both ages it was explored.