March Sensory Bin Ideas

Sensory Bin ideas for Dr. Seuss and St. Patrick's Day

March is coming and with it all things Seuss, as well as St. Patrick's Day and for some, Spring Break! This is a great time to get something fun in your sensory bins! I have multiple sensory bins - our large 4 person table, as well as smaller 1 or 2 person Rubbermaid bins. This lets me add sensory fun to a variety of center activities, thus increasing engagement AND helping to develop fine motor skills and provide sensory input!

Green eggs & ham in green rice & beans anyone? I love this one because the mix can be reused for St. Patrick's Day in just a few weeks! Add some props from your Dramatic Play Center and students can have fun subitizing while matching number cards with ten frames! Adding the different size beans means lots of options for additional counting and sorting once students have finished the activity too!

 I love it when I can differentiate activities in my sensory bin. In this case, the cards can be matched to produce rhyming pairs, or matched to CVC word cards. This way my high flyers can be moving on, while those that need it continue to get support with rhyming. Red rice from Valentine's Day makes a reappearance and is mixed with pompoms - students love using the pompoms to block funnel spouts or fill up a container with the pompoms and then see how much rice can still fit!

Our new favorite sensory bin filler is dyed Epsom salt. Epsom salt is inexpensive, and looks like shiny crystals when dyed. You dye it the same way as rice - a little rubbing alcohol and some food coloring! These happy little fellows have sums on their chests and match an addition sentence card, so students can have fun with sums to 10!

 

Want the activities? Click here to see them in my TPT store!

 St. Patrick's Day is a big deal in my classroom - we love having Silly McGilly visit! Here's he's made a rainbow of rice in our sensory table! Yes, it gets messed up immediately, but the kids love it and it's often featured when they write about Silly McGilly's visit!

 For this bin, I spray painted glass gems gold and then write on them with Sharpies. Some have letters and some have numbers.

 Students find the "gold" and match it to the correct mat - either finding the beginning sound picture that matches the letter, or finding the number on the pot of gold - but they have to go in numerical order, to make it trickier lol!

One of our favorite morning bins in March is pots of gold with play dough - they have to make "gold pieces" to match the number on the pot! Grab these St. Patrick's Day Sensory Bin Mats for FREE in my TPT store by clicking here.

We also write our letters in green hair gel - just add it to a baggie and make sure its completely closed! In this picture, Silly McGilly made a three-way match with our St. Patrick's Day Alphabet Match-Up cards - uppercase, lowercase and beginning sound picture, then he wrote the "S" in the gel!

Next up, Spring Life Cycles - are you raising any critters in your classroom this year? Check out this post for info on my favorite life cycle products for the classroom - including FREE Life Cycle crowns! 

Pattern Worms & Chenille Chicks

Yesterday we went up to Oklahoma City so my daughter could receive a Poetry Award (she won 1st place in the 2015 Oklahoma Lore Youth Poetry Contest for 10th grade).

Afterwards we decided to stop at the zoo for an hour. Last time we were there, Sullivan was all about the animals. In fact, he spent 20 minutes jabbering to the gorillas. In a dramatic turn of events, he went into hysterics when we entered the ape building this time. He started screaming "No monkey!" No monkey!" when the orangutan got close to the window. So...we headed for the gift store. After placating him with a new giraffe rubber duck (he has a rubber duck obsession, at last count he had 50+, all unique and much loved, they are his go-to distraction and as toys go, relatively cheap!) I got to peruse the books and found this gem, 10 Little Hermit Crabs, for our upcoming Ocean Theme:

It's a super cute counting book with a happy ending (all 10 hermit crabs show back up on the last page!)

We've been finishing up our Spring theme in class - although our butterfly and chicken eggs arrived late this year so we'll be doing our Life Cycle unit in conjunction with Ocean and Farm instead of during the Spring theme as planned.

One of our favorite Spring activities was our Pattern Worms. These are super simple and a great quick patterning assessment!

 I cut pipe cleaners in 1/2 and then twisted one end to form a loop.

I had both clear and opaque pony beads, so the kids could choose whatever colors they wanted.

Once the beads were in place, I made a small loop at the opposite end and hit it with the glue gun to ensure the beads stayed on.When the wiggle eyes were attached, the kids were thrilled with our "worms" and loved playing with them!

 

The best thing is that everyone can be successful - whether they're still working on AB patterns or have moved on to more complicated patterns (I had a sweetie do an ABCDEFG pattern correctly!) each child was able to create a pattern worm. And, its great fine motor practice to get those slippery beads onto the pipe cleaner!

Our Sand & Water Table also got a fun Spring theme activity! I took chenille chickens and baby chick (both from Hobby Lobby's Easter aisle) and added mini eggs (also Easter) and mini birds' nests (from over by the artificial flowers and birds). Then I added some plain white paper litter (from PetSmart - it's meant for small animal cages, but its dye free & dust free so its great for the sensory table!) and some lima beans.

The lima beans had upper case letters, lower case letters and the #s 0-20 on them.

After the kids had fun playing with the chicks, invariably they wanted something to do with the lima beans! We did everything from sorting them by upper/lower case, sorting by letter/number, finding specific letters, spelling out names etc. This was a super quick bin to put together and the kids had a lot of fun with it. They did wish I had created a sorting mat for them like I did for St. Patrick's Day, so that's on my to-do list for next time I change the materials!