First Sensory Bin: Pond Theme

We started our tot school/preschool on July 11 and this is definitely going to be a learning process figuring out what works/what doesn't and how to do things with 2 boys at very different levels, but yet they want to do everything exactly the same!

Luckily the sensory bin was probably the greatest success of all the activities. They both loved playing with it, and asked for it several times.

I will save all the other details of our first week of tot-school for a different post, I will hopefully have that up soon.

For now I will just share our first sensory bin. I have decided to do one per month, and we will have one theme per month instead of trying to do a theme to go along with each letter of the week. We are starting with a pond theme.

In the Bin:

Blue dyed rice 

Felt lily pads

Frogs and Turtles from Safari Frogs and Turtles Toob (bought from Amazon)

Dragonflies from Animal Planet Bugs in a Tube (bought at Toys R Us)

Fish from Circo Underwater Life Collection Tube (bought at Target)

Snail aquarium decoration I had because many years ago it lived in a hermit crab tank

Cards from the Pond Preschool Pack at Homeschool Creations

We did a little matching of the objects with the cards:

They didn't play with it long that day because their neighbor friend came to the door wanting them to play outside.

The next pictures are from a different day.  I had found these M&M cups at Walmart and thought they would be great for sorting activities and such.  So I gave them each a cup and a plastic spoon and they scooped the rice into the cups.

This is what the bin looked like when they were done.  They ended up with all 5 cups in there and they (mostly T) sorted the objects by color putting the green turtle in the green cup and so on.

I'd say we made if a good 15-20 minutes before the rice started ending up outside the bin in large quantities.  I think they had a great time with it, and I really look forward to putting these together for all the themes I have planned for the next few months!

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