{Valentine's Day} Sensory Bin

A Valentine's Day sensory bin  is a great time to explore and play with symbols of the holiday as well as fun red objects. I recently share the bin above with JDaniel and he had a great time exploring, learning with and, playing with its contents.

What did I put in it?

• Valentine's Day themed stencil
• Heart shaped cookie cutters
• Heart shaped doilies
• Heart shaped sunglasses
• Red funnels
• Red and pink buttons
• Ribbon
• Heart shaped Straw
• Heart shaped skewers
• Red beans
• Dice with  hearts on them
• Pink Spoon

While children just love to explore and create their own activities with sensory bins, I like to guide JDaniel just a little bit. After he had checked everything out and played with it for awhile, I suggested we try the activities below.

Sunglass Weaving

He simply wove a couple of strand of ribbon through the slats in the sunglasses. It was a great small motor skill and in took some concentration to do. He couldn't see through them when he was done, but it was a fun activity.

Estimating Beans

How many beans did JDaniel think would fit into each cookie cutter? Did the same number of beans fill the large cookie cutter as they did the small one?  In this case the large one did not get filled up by the same number of beans. It didn't even fill one layer of beans.

Heart Skewer Shuffleboard

The heart shaped skewers made perfect shuffle board sticks. I had JDaniel test out whether the bean or the button made it farther when it was shuffled across the kitchen table. I think he added a little more force behind the that he wanted to win. He had picked the bean. Either way it was a fun activity.


Straw Blowing Activity

JDaniel also worked on blowing a button and a bean across the table with a straw. The skewers were much easier to use to get the bean and button moving. It took a lot of blowing to get the button across the table.


Funneling Buttons

Which buttons could be sent through the small funnel? Which ones went through the larger one? Really on the smallest buttons made it through the funnels. A few of the buttons got struck and we had to use the  skewer to pop them back up through the  top.

Slinky Measurements

JDaniel has the most fun with this plastic heart shaped slinky. He loved trying to get it to flop and and spring back up. I had him place it on the end of the sensory bin and count how many hearts across the bin was. That got him thinking about other things he could measure the length of. He ended up measuring chair, tables and even his bear. They were accurate measurements due to the fact that the slinky had to be stretched out to measure the length of some things, but it was great counting practice.

As I mentioned a sensory bin is mostly for exploring, but I did want to share with you six activities we did with the contents of this bin.