Babies and toddlers love to get messy and learn and my 2.5 yr old is no exception. I try to do one or two Sensory bins each week because – it keeps them busy for an hour or so, it promotes independent play, and it is a great way for them to learn and explore new things.
This week we are talking about emotions with our toddler and I came up with this Sensory bin for him to make the learning easier and much more fun. For this setup, you will need :
- At of wooden or plastic eggs. We used the wooden eggs we got from Amazon. You can also use ping pong balls or the plastic Easter eggs you can find in Dollar stores.
- Some Halloween stickers, like the ones here.
- Paper towel tubes
- Any Sensory medium. I chose kinetic sand as J loves playing with it.
SETUP
With J’s help, we made a mixture of 3 emotions – Sadness, Happiness and Anger. It was so fun to do this step with J. I painted 3 paper towel tubes and used stickers to make the same expressions as we used in the eggs. I had to cut open the tubes, so it’s easier for the eggs to fall through them. I stuck them on a piece of cardboard and taped it to the wall. In the Sensory bin, I buried some eggs in the kinetic sand.
THE ACTIVITY
I asked J to post the eggs into the tubes that matched the expression on the egg. As he did the activity, we talked about the expression, copied the expressions ourselves and talked about what each emotion meant. My toddler continued playing with the sand even after the activity.
