Another holiday. Another Dollar Tree sensory bin. This St. Patrick’s Day sensory bin is super easy and can be adapted to meet the needs of your kids. For R, I only added three simple supplies and she loved it. She wasn’t too sure at first, but after a couple of days of playing with it, she loved the feel of the materials and couldn’t stop playing with it.
This bin includes some green sparkly Easter basket grass. Say what? Easter grass for a St. Patrick’s Day bin. That’s a win in my book. I loved how sparkly it was. We have never included sparkly materials before so she was loving this.
I also picked up a big pack of their rainbow colored tissue paper for a buck and took one sheet of the green and ripped it up into a bunch of little pieces. She loved the sound this paper made.
Dollar Tree also had these feather boas in their St. Patrick’s Day section so I snagged a solid green one and a green and white one and tossed those in. These took a bit of time for R to adjust to. They do easily fall apart so if you do pick these up make sure your little ones don’t get the pieces in their mouths (that goes for all the materials…do not let your babies unattended when playing with these bins).
If you are wanting to extend this sensory bin, you could place gold coins in it and have kids try to find them, or you could place sight words/spelling words etc and have them find them. The possibilities are endless really. Working on specific skill? Incorporate it into the bin. The base of the bin is super cheap and adding a few other items can make it even more useful.
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 tissue paper made a crinkly sound, how the Easter grass was sparkly and shiny, how the feather boas were soft and tickly, and the biggest one of all was the color green. . R likes to mix things up so it was fun to talk about mixing and then separating the items again. R’s favorite activities with just about any object is transferring it from one place to another and then back again. She would take the different materials out of the bin and place them on the floor and would then pick them up and put them back in the bin. This allows us to talk about positional words and her cleanup skills..win win for mommy.
What I LOVE about this sensory bin:
-It was cheap. Less than 3 dollars because the tissue paper was one piece of 24 for $1.00.
-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 this one bin and the sensory experiences R had were too many to count.
-R expressed her personality in her own way and I was able to watch and learn how she learns just by watching her explore.
-It focused on the color green and the different shades of the color green.
This looks so fun and simple to make! :)
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