Sensory bins are a wonderful play experience for kids that stimulate the senses and encourage children’s development and learning in a number of ways. Halloween sensory bins can be made with a variety of objects, such as plastic skeletons, witches, bats, and other toys, fuzzy pompoms in black, yellow, and orange, squishy snakes and spiders, slippery gel beads, etc but we made a very simple one with a container of warm water and a dollar store package of googly eyes, along with some scoops, tongs, and spoons.
The instructions for making this sensory bin, are as simple as the ingredients. Pour some warmish water into a container, find some tools in the kitchen drawer, dump in a few googly eyes and let kids play. This googly eyes and warm water play engaged a 3 year old and a 6 year old for over an hour!
Instead of one big container for both kids, they each had their own and their own set of tools. They played in different ways but also talked to each other as they made discoveries they wanted to share. They scooped the eyes out and lined them up on the table, gave them baths, tried to pick them up with the tongs and spoons of various sizes, pushed them over to one side and then the other, turned them all over so the eyes could see up, and more. It was delightful to watch and hear how they played. They had conversations with the little bits of white and black plastic that are used to make googly eyes.
There was a tremendous amount of play happening such as eye-hand coordination (tee-hee) and small muscle development, using language, making choices, taking action, imagining, and more. Water is calming, which is very helpful with the excitement building for Halloween, and certainly a sensory experience. Could this play activity be a treat for your child?