St. Patrick’s Day Sensory Bin

We absolutely love sensory play around here and also love to incorporate holidays into the mix. Coming up next week is St. Patrick’s Day, so this week we created a fun St. Patrick’s Day sensory bin.

Benefits of Sensory Play

Sensory play allows children to be curious. It allows then to engage multiple senses including: touch, sight, sound, taste, and smell. Not all sensory activities will engage all senses but if you continue to explore sensory play, you can engage them all. There truly is no limit to sensory play. Sensory play can be engaged with in multiple ways and promotes problem-solving, creativity, and exploration. There is also no age limit to sensory play, it can help their development from infancy throughout school age. This is why we built a bigger sensory table recently, so that my big kids can still enjoy sensory play!

See a longer post on the benefits of sensory play here.

Encouraging Engaged Play

There are many ways to encourage engaged play with sensory bins. For our St. Patrick’s Day sensory bin, I actually provided very little guidance. This is likely not because of what I provided by rather, how often we have done sensory bins.

As some examples, my children quickly went to sorting and scooping chick peas into pots of gold. They also spent time combining and gathering gold. They also used the rainbow to scoop and reorganize. Many times, they play a game of seek and find. In this situation, they grabbed out some of our other loose parts from our bins of sensory toys and hid them inside pots with rice and chick peas on top and took turns trying to guess where the item was hidden. Other times, they pretend to play store and barter for different toys and items.

More sensory bin play options: mud kitchen, Valentine’s Day bin, and instant snow.