Sensory Bins: Recycled Kids Activity

I have been admiring the sensory bins that many blogger mom’s do with their kids. They are popular among home schooling mom’s, preschools, crafting mom’s and Montessori education. What has kept me from making them with my kids is that I have been working on not buying cheap dollar store (or other) toys, crafts and stuff just to occupie my kids time. Well since the weather does not allow them to play outside as much anymore I have been creatively coming up with more craft activities. Also my daughter attends a Waldorf preschool. We like her school and I think the activities that she does there are great, she misses the typical school crafts and activities she did last year in preschool.

So then I thought about it and decided I could come up with sensory bins that used stuff we already have around the house.

Our first bins are:

The Happy Birthday 4 Bin. This is for my daughter who will be 4 next week. She is so excited for her birthday so we decided to start celebrating a little early. It contains typical birthday stuff, candles, bows, birthday cards, napkins, etc and there is 4 of everything (except the tissue paper filler). All the stuff in the bin I had saved from past parties, gifts and activities so we are reusing everything. This was a great way to use up ripped tissue paper, recycled greeting cards, squished bows, etc.

To go along with this bin we are going to read: If You Give a Cat a Cupcake. Also we will work on a P is for Party letter to go with our alphabet letters that we are decorating our playroom with.

I decided Leo needed a bin to. Although I don’t see him leaving the stuff in the bin, so I know a mess is ahead. So I made him a construction bin full of trucks, rocks, scoops and frogs. I just used toys form theie toy bins but I had to buy a few small bags of rocks to fill the bin (we didn’t have any in our yard). We will reuse the rocks in other projects, our garden or future outside play.

I am excited to do a Christmas bin, recycle bin, baking bin and winter bin in the next couple of weeks or months. I will continue to reuse and recycle as many items for the bins as possible.

Update: 12-5-10: The kids played with their bins today. Rorie really liked it and did all the counting, art projects, made up her own games, etc. Leo played with his for about 5 minutes. Then he dumped it out on the ground and rolled around in the rocks! Maybe he is too young for sensory bins.

This is how Leo decided to have his Sensory experience!

and here’s Rorie’s (about 2hrs after she started playing with it)