Try your hand at these easy summer sensory bins!
This summer is the first summer that I’ll be home with three children ages five and under. I’m so excited, but slightly terrified. I am an introvert, as is my three year old. We can stay home and be very happy. My 6 month old naps extremely well…but only when we stay home. Then there’s my very extroverted five year old who wants to be out and doing all the things with all the people, which is something I love about him. Though, it can sometimes make long days at home challenging. To combat this, I like to have activities to break up free play that don’t include television (don’t get me wrong, we will be watching plenty).
My goal this summer is to create activities that are fun, creative, and easy. It’s also super important to me that they can be reused or easily recreated. I don’t like putting myself in a box, so I’m guessing I’ll try 1-3 activities per week. So far I’ve done two that will definitely be favorites around here and are so entirely easy to do, include these summer sensory bins.
Colored Pasta:
- Cook and drain pasta according to package directions.
- Add it to a ziplock bag with a couple drops of oil (I used olive oil).
- Put lots of food coloring in the bag and mix it up until all the pasta is colored (I did a few different colors of blue and green and I liked how it turned out multi-colored)
- Let cool on a cookie sheet (I found this to be an important step so that the pasta didn’t get sticky).
To clean the toys, I filled a bin with soapy water and just let them go to town! I did these activities on different days, but altogether I spent about 10-15 minutes preparing and cleaning up. They spent about 45 minutes playing, so I call it a success! We will definitely be doing both activities again.
Let me know your go-to activities in the comments!
