I love playing and teaching with Sensory Bins. Sensory bins are a cheap and fun way for toddlers to learn through play using their senses. A child develops their fine motor skills that are later needed to hold a pencil. Language is developed as they describe the objects or feelings of an object. sensory Bins help with improving a child's ability to concentrate on one thing. A child learns through play while stimulating all five senses. The best part about Sensory Bins is that as my child plays I can sit back with a cup of coffee and just watch her explore the bin. I get to see the excitement she experiences while exploring all the new objects. I literally get to relax as she is learning through play.


Another great benefit of Sensory Bins is that they can be used again and again. When I introduced the Fall Sensory Bin to my daughter I gave her different sized buckets to sort the spiders, pumpkins and rats into. She also poured the beans from one bucket to another. Simple exploration with the items. There was no structure to the play as she figured out how she wanted to play with the items in front of her.


After a couple of times playing with the Sensory Bin we took a nature walk and picked fallen leaves to add to our Sensory Bin. I also added different sizes of plastic spoons, measuring spoons and a scooper I kept from a container of finished powder tea mix. My 1 year old began scooping the beans with each of the spoons and really got into scooping the beans from on bucket to the next. Again no structure to this play time.


As you can see from the above photo that my daughter also enjoyed playing with the items that had been placed in the bin. She enjoyed pulling the tails on the mini rats and the legs on the spiders. She also decided she preferred the leaves ripped up and mixed into the beans.

Some people use rice for their Sensory Bins in this case I think the two types of beans really add to the textural and visual senses. Plus they are easier to clean up than rice. I prefer rice for my outside Sensory Bins.

As I end this post I want to share a couple tips as to keeping the cost of Sensory Bins cheap.

• Use recycled items like milk jug caps, old craft supplies, matchbox cars or pinecones.
• Buy clearance items.
• Reuse the fillers. I put the beans in zip baggies for future Sensory Bins.
• Change out items frequently to keep Toddlers interest.

                                                     
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