Thursday, November 1, 2012

Under the Sea Sensory Bin

This past week, I dug out the Samhain sensory bin from last year. We hadn't done one in a while - this summer we had the sand and water table outside, which we used on a nearly daily basis when the weather was nice:

But now that it's chilly again (low 40s and rain), we need some indoor options. Especially since we're looking at a likely diagnosis of sensory processing disorder for Acorn  (IEP next week, hopefully with helpful results).

He's been enjoying the rice in the bin this week, and Leaf has been cautious about it, but since it's now November, it's time for a new bin, and I'd had a water theme in mind for quite a while, so here we go.

  
 





We have a new bin - this one is clear, and has a latching lid that Acorn can't open.  I'd heard about water beads a while back and thought they would be really neat for a water themed bin, so I started half of the package soaking a few days go. Unfortunately, what looked like a lot of beads turned out to only be about 3/4 of an inch in the bottom of our new bin (and it's smaller than the dishpan I was using before, so it'd've been even less there). Since I'm swapping out bins on my day off, I just added the rest of the package of beads, a few cups of water, and threw the fish and such in on top of them. I made sure to leave a spoon and some cups of various sizes for pouring the beads back and forth.

I expect this will be a challenging texture for both Acorn and Leaf - we'll see how they do, because too challenging might result in a quick change of bins, and I only really have one other theme in mind.

2 comments:

  1. Ooh. That looks awesome. Billy likes to mouth things sometimes - are these things safe? (not a choking hazard/nontoxic).

    Our current bins are a rice bin, a bin full of various colors of those decorative flat marbles, and a bin full of tons of brightly colored puff balls and synthetic feathers and yarn. All of them are big favorites.

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  2. no - not safe for mouths. We're having to supervise pretty closely. They're smaller than marbles, and somewhat squishy (not quite like tapioca, but close). Actually, I wonder how chia seeds or tapioca would be....



    We've also done bird seed and black beans. I have plans for jello, cotton balls, and aquarium gravel


    I've also been eyeing some bathtub ones - I saw someone make colored bath water and then make ghosts out of shaving cream, floating on the water....

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