We love sensory play in our house. It’s cheap, easy, and keeps little ones entertained forever. Not to mention, it is great for their development. One of our favorite types of sensory play is sensory bins. We have made a few this fall, and I am finally getting a chance to share them with you if you are looking for a last minute idea to celebrate Halloween with your littles.
Halloween Sensory Bin
For this sensory bin, we used our normal sensory bin supplies and added some Halloween party favors. Our typical sensory bins consist of our Sterlite container turned sensory bin, a filler (either dried beans, rice, or water beads), and some little toys (in this instance the party favors). You can also use other fillers in your sensory bins such as kinetic sand, cornmeal, and cereal, we have just chosen to stick to the dried beans, rice, and water beads. For this one, I pulled out our big bag of beans, added them to the sensory bin and then hid the Halloween favors in it. I then gave Big Brother a pair of kitchen tongs to dig the favors out with. After he had gotten them out the first time, I re-hid them and had him sort them by color. Then, we did it again, and he sorted them by type (skeleton, spider, snake, etc). I left this one out for about a week after our first day of playing with it, and let him imagine and play with it in his own way. At one point, he was using the beans as food to feed the spiders, and creating all kinds of scenarios. This is a great bin to make with any favors you get while trick or treating, or even if you catch them on sale at the store!
Eyeball Bin
This sensory bin was a bit more creative. I happened upon some various eyeballs at Hobby Lobby. Some were small and sticky and others were ping pong ball sized. I paired both of these with some water beads and created our ooey gooey eyeball bin. I gave Big Brother some scoops and had him scoop the eyeballs out and sort them by small and large. If you have never used water beads they are one of our favorite activities! One bag lasts forever because we can fill our sensory bin with just a few tablespoons of the water beads. You just add them to water and let them soak overnight. They make a great sensory bin filler for activities like this. You can get some here (ad). You can also order the eyeballs here (ad) or we found ours at Hobby Lobby. I need to add that this activity is only safe for kids who do not put things in their mouths as the water beads and small eyeballs can be a choking hazard. We left the lid on ours and only used it when little brother napped.
Pumkin Sensory Play
Our last sensory “bin” was nature’s sensory bin. We cut the top off of an extra pumpkin that we ended up with and let both boys go to town. Big brother had fun digging the guts out and separating the seeds, while little brother had fun feeling and tasting the pumpkin guts.
After a while Big Brother started pretending that the pumpkin was a volcano, so we decided to take it a step further and try to make our own volcano with baking soda and vinegar. We admittedly did not have enough baking soda and vinegar since it was unplanned, but he was still in awe watching it fix. For some reason he connects volcanoes and dinosaurs, so he went and added his toy dinosaurs into the fun. (Nevermind the fact that we were going to have three volcanoes in our front yard in Guatemala, or that we watched Fuego fume on numerous occasions. Nope, Volcanoes= Dinosaurs.) So, if you have an extra pumpkin sitting around, just cut the top off and let their imaginations run wild.
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