Weather Themed Sensory Bins

Sensory play has many benefits and here at Mac-n-Taters we love a good sensory bin. Sensory play is any type of play that stimulates the child’s senses. Sensory bins allow kids to play, create, investigate and explore a variety of materials in a variety of ways. It naturally encourages children to explore and investigate.

Throughout our Weather themed unit, we have had many different sensory play experiences. Each week, I set up a new sensory bin for the kids to explore. This post contains affiliate links for your convenience.

My kids love sensory play, especially sensory bins, which for the last couple months have been coined “sensory floor” in our house. Who knew two little ones could make such a giant mess so quickly.

This bin was used several different times throughout the month in several different ways. I absolutely love how it can be used for different things. I started by added blue colored rice, cotton balls, two different kinds of blue glass gems, a blue bowl, tongs, and our blue no spill paint cup to a plastic storage bin. The kids had fun scooping rice and gems and pushing cotton balls into the cup.

I quickly transformed it by adding some cloud counting cards from an activity in our Weather PreK Pack. Little Miss would bury the cards and then find one, count the clouds, and add it to her bowl.

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We also transformed our Cloud Sensory Bin into our Rain Sensory Bin, by adding some cut up blue straws, a bottle, and a funnel. The kids worked to push the cotton balls and cut up straws into the bottle and then used the funnel to fill it up to create a rain bottle. The sound of the rice falling around the cotton balls and straws sounded like rain. 

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My absolute favorite bin, as well as the kids, was our Rainbow bin. The colors were so bright and cheery and it helped brighten many of the gloomy rainy days we had this month. To create this one I simply colored the rice using vinegar and liquid watercolors, let it dry and then added it to the bin one color at a time. I dropped some fruit pouch lids, pom poms and spoons into the bin and let the kids explore. I also set out our Ikea bowls to allow for scooping and color sorting. They immediately started mixing and scooping the rice all together and their favorite part was burying each other’s hands in the rice and then quickly (read rice everywhere) unburying themselves. They love this one.

 

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This one was so simple, but made such a huge statement. I took different materials we had one hand and threw them in to represent the different types of weather we talked about. Cotton balls and white pom poms represented snow and clouds, blue crinkle paper was the sky, blue glass gems were rain, black pom poms were storm clouds, yellow pouch caps were suns and yellow pipe cleaners were bent into lightening strikes. I laid out our Weather Vocabulary cards from our Weather PreK pack and Little Miss matched up the different materials based on what she thought they stood for.

It was a fantastic month of sensory play!!!

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Looking for more Weather themed learning fun. Be sure to check out all of our other Weather Themed Preschool Posts for more learning inspiration.