Sensory Play – Page 4 – A House of Play

14 March 2024

3 St. Patrick’s Day Sensory Activities for Kids

It’s the week before St. Patrick’s Day, and we’re getting into the lucky spirit with a few themed activities. My kids love celebrating holidays and special activities add to the fun. Here are a few we tried that were hits with my 3 and 5 year old.

Magnetic Sensory Treasure Hunt

magnetic sensory st. patrick's day activity

For this activity, I included some magnetic items (magnetic bingo chips, pipe cleaner shamrocks) and non-magnetic items (felt balls, tube ribbon pieces, acrylic gems) in a bin filled with shredded accordion paper. The kids used the magnetic wands to hunt around in the bin and find treasures. My 5 year old loved experimenting with magnetism and was very focused on what items were attracted to the magnetic wands.

Materials

Paper filler (packaging from a delivery)
Gold tube ribbon
Pipe cleaner shamrocks
Learning Resources Magnet Wands
Magnetic bingo chips
Acrylic gems
Rainbow felt balls (@sewingseedsplay – HOUSEOFPLAY10)
Rainbow rice mix – @eyespyclub
Wood ‘Pot of Gold’ tray – @awandco
Wood rainbow tray – @eyespyclub
Grapat wood sensory tool – @sewingseedsplay

st patricks sensory bin and pot of gold wood tray

2. Sensory Foam (Aquafaba) Coin Hunt

This was our first time trying chick pea foam (Aquafaba) so it was new, exciting and tons of fun for the kids. I hid the gold coins and gems in the foam so the kids could hunt around for them with tweezers and fill their cauldrons.

Aquafaba is a fantastic sensory base. I was inspired by @lifewith3men on Instagram to try this and followed her instructions (whip together juice from 2 cans of chick peas + 1/4tsp cream of tartar). It was so easy and the kids loved it. I was also super surprised that it didn’t end up being messy at all.

The tweezers were great for their hand muscles and fine motor skills.

Another thing I loved about this activity is that it is very inexpensive. If you’re having chick peas in your dinner and save the juice, it’s practically free. All the other materials, including the trays, are from the dollar store (Dollarama), except the gems (AliExpress).

3. St. Patrick’s Day Rainbows & Rice Sensory Bin

The third activity was a sensory rice bin. I love a bin like this with lots of different things to discover because I will leave it out for at least a few days. That way, the kids can explore at their own pace. Over the past few days, they have been enjoying scooping rice and filling up little cauldrons with all kinds of treasures.

Materials

Rice with sequins
Rainbow wood insert & rainbow tray – Eye Spy Club
St. Paddy’s trinkets and loose parts – Eye Spy Club and Highway to Railway (Instagram)
Wood cauldron tray – AW and Collective
Felt balls – Sewing Seeds Play (save with code: HOUSEOFPLAY10)
Bauspiel lucent cubes – Scholars Choice
Resin containers – Playspiration (Instagram)
Wood rainbow – Tiny Fox Hole
Grimm’s Giant Gems – Sewing Seeds Play
Acrylic small gems – AliExpress

wood sensory tray with st. patrick's day trinkets, sensory invitation to play

So there are 3 ideas for St. Patrick’s Day sensory and messy play. Would you try any of these activities? Let me know in the comments.

23 February 202423 February 2024

Farm Sensory Play Tray

If you saw my last post, then you know my 3 year old son loves his farm toys. He begged me to set up a farm activity for him. So, I used some sensory materials from my cupboard and from previous activities to make him a tray.

I used dry popcorn, green split peas for grass, and chocolate cereal for mud. I had a leftover mix from a previous activity of dry spaghetti, lentils and ground up cereal that covered the horse paddock.

Other materials

Felt pond (Sewing Seeds Play)
Wood fences (Ostheimer)
Animals (Schleich)
Chicken coop (Schleich)
Barn (Fisher-price)

My son was thrilled. I love a tray like this with dry goods because I will leave them out for a few days. Although the odd stray piece will make it out of the tray, it’s fairly easy to pick up. It’s an easy way to add a little special magic to his farm play.

19 February 202419 February 2024

Leftover Flowers Sensory Play Tray

Flowers are so expensive, it’s a shame to throw them out once they start declining. I had some flowers that were starting to wilt, so I froze them in a container of water and turned them into a flower ice block for sensory play.

freeze leftover flowers for sensory play

I placed the frozen flower ice block on our Tuff Tray with a few play scarves underneath for colour and grip. Then I added my DIY Fizzy Powder, water, some bowls, scoops, pipettes, dried rose buds, soap shavings and a selection of loose parts.

I have done ice block, fizzy play before, but tried a few slight adjustments this time – and it worked better. The ice was thinner, so it was easier to separate the flowers from it and I put the ice out early on the tray so it had started to melt by the time the kids came in to play with it.

Materials

Flower Ice Block
Fizzy Powder
Natural add-ins (I had some dried rose buds (Sewing Seeds Play) and soap shavings that I put out)
Loose parts (the resin pieces are from Stars and Sensory and Playspiration on Instagram, the acrylic loose pieces are from Eye Spy Club)
Bowls (most from my kitchen, the eco friendly pie crust dishes are from Stars and Sensory)
Tools (pipettes, tongs, any other scoops or stirring sticks)

My Thoughts

Fun – High

The kids loved this tray. They found the frozen flowers very interesting and inviting and were very content making fizzy potions and flower soup for hours.

Engagement Time – 1 hour +

The tray stayed out for about half the day and the kids played with it on and off. I didn’t time every play session, but a conservative estimate of play time is 1 hour +.

Cost – Low

The ice flower block and DIY Fizzy Powder are inexpensive to make and you can add whatever loose parts or dried flowers you have on hand.

Effort – Medium

This activity has a fairly quick and easy set up. It doesn’t create much mess while the activity is happening – I love that about water and fizzy play. If a little water drips on the floor, it’s not a big deal. Most of the effort comes during the clean up. When the play was over, I separated all the loose parts, bowls and scoops and washed and dried them, Then I removed all the silks, rinsed them and set them aside to wash in the washing machine. Lastly, I threw the flowers in the compost and mopped up the water in the tray. All the mess stayed in the tray, so for me, the clean-up effort didn’t seem too bad.

Final Thoughts

I have discovered that ice play is great for leaving out for many hours. The ice melts and changes over time, revealing new discoveries for the kids. We left this tray out for about half the day. The kids loved tinkering with it and then being able to leave and return at will.

Fizzy Play with pipettes and tongs is always a great chance to practice fine motor skills. The pinching and squeezing is a great workout for tiny hands. By not including many ladles or tools that scoop water, it forced the kids to use the pipettes more and their skills improved throughout play.

The flowers froze beautifully and I loved being able to repurpose them into something new. I’m always a little sad when cut flowers die and this was a great way to give them a grand, final send-off. I will definitely use wilted flowers again in sensory play.

16 February 202416 February 2024

Extra Travel Activities for Kids

We traveled for my dad’s Celebration of Life last week and I knew it would be a difficult week for the kids, so packed some extra materials to help keep the kids occupied during the event and other appointments.

On-the-Go Activities

We will sometimes bring these activities to a restaurant, on the rare occasion that we go to one. But, they also worked great for travel. Once again, many of these ideas are inspired by Mini Jetsetter.

For each one of my kids (3 and 5), I put together a pouch with art materials, a sketch book, mini colouring book, mess-free painting, water ring game, and at least one animal figure.

I also gave them each a mini lego set in a pencil case.

Everything above is from Dollarama or was a gift from the hairdresser or came from friends’ goody bags. The water ring game is from Jean Coutu (a drug store in Quebec) and the mess free painting sheets are from Amazon. Nothing is precious. I include things in these kits expecting them to get dropped, left behind and gifted to other kids we meet.

On-the-Go Sensory Activity – Pluffle

I packed an extra sensory activity, in case we needed to occupy the kids for a while at my mom’s house. I brought a ziplock bag full of Pluffle because it’s very light weight and you can squeeze the air out in the bag so it packs up small.

At my mom’s house, I dumped the bag into a bin and brought out some of the play kitchen dishes – and voila, a Pluffle tea party. It kept the kids busy for 2 hours. To me, that counts as a success. The only drawback to Pluffle is that it can be messy. We needed to do some sweeping and vacuuming after the activity.

15 February 202415 February 2024

Play Dough Love Bugs

Using the adorable Eye Spy Club wood love bug play pieces for inspiration, we made some love bug creations of our own. I quickly pulled together a selection of loose parts, diy heart stamps, play dough, cookie cutters and trays.

Loose Parts (all from Dollarama unless otherwise noted)

cupcake picks (wood picks from Homesense)
suction toys
pipe cleaners
googly eyes
wood hearts
heart gems
“O’s” from x’s and o’s game
paper heart straws

The kids came up with some very interesting creations. I’m sure there are many other fun loose parts we could have added. Any suggestions?

9 February 202415 February 2024

Loads of Love – Valentine’s Sensory Play Tray

My son has never met a vehicle he doesn’t love, so I thought I would set up a construction themed Valentine’s play tray for him and his sister. To give the activity a little more interest for his older sister, I set up 2 letter recognition/ matching activities. The first one had the letters for “love” written on garages and the individual letters on construction vehicles so the kids could park each vehicle in the garage with the corresponding letter. The other one was to write the alphabet out in the middle of the tray and cover it with popcorn kernels. The kids could dig in the popcorn to find the letters and then match them with wooden letter blocks.

valentines construction sensory activity

To set up the activity, I put our Tuff Tray on top of our Nugget foam play couches. I find if the tray is off the ground, it helps the kids keep the mess inside the tray. They are less tempted to scoop material into containers on the ground. I connected our IKEA Ravunge roads in a circle on the tray and wrote out the alphabet with a chalk marker in the centre of the circle. Then I set up a few magnetic tiles as “garages” and labeled them with “l”, “o”, “v”, “e” and then labeled four construction vehicles with the same letters. I poured the popcorn kernels on the tray to cover the letters, sprinkled some satin hearts, added a wooden dump truck tray, felt hearts and more vehicles. The last step was to add the wooden letter blocks, for matching with the letters hiding under the popcorn kernels.

Materials used in this activity

Tuff Tray
Popcorn Kernels (Bulk Barn)
IKEA Ravunge roads
Various construction vehicles
Magnetic Tiles
Chalk marker
Wooden Dump Truck Tray (AW and Collective)
Felt hearts (Sewing Seeds Play)
Satin hearts (Dollarama)
Wood letter blocks (Birch and Bark Natural Wood)

My thoughts

This activity turned out great on an entertainment and learning level. Here are my thoughts

Fun – High

The kids (3.5 yrs and 5.5 yrs old) had a great time with this activity. My son loved driving the vehicles through the popcorn, putting them in garages and everything vehicle related. While my daughter does not get as excited about vehicles, she loved the letter recognition aspect of it and found plenty to keep her attention.

Engagement Time – 45mins + 45mins + 30mins

We left this tray out for 3 days. The popcorn kernels didn’t make much of a mess and were big enough that I could pick them off the floor if a few stray ones made it off the tray. The first night the tray was out, the kids were most interested in driving vehicles, scooping popcorn and putting vehicles in the garages. The next day, they became more interested in the letter recognition part of the activity. On day 3, the kids started thinking of new ways to use the popcorn and it became feed for the farm animals. Once too much of the popcorn started getting out of the tray for my liking, I cleaned up the activity.

Cost – Medium

I used about $15 (cdn) worth of popcorn, and a small package of satin hearts from Dollarama. Everything else we had in our toy and sensory activity supplies. The roads from IKEA are very reasonably priced and construction vehicles are available in dollar stores.

Effort – Medium

The activity took me about 20 minutes to set up and after 3 days, I did have to pick up some popcorn off the floor, but otherwise I didn’t think this activity required too much effort.

Final thoughts

This tray worked well for multiple days of play. It offered enough variety to keep the kids attention and was clean enough for me to leave out in the playroom. It was great for catching my vehicle-loving-son’s attention and the different letter recognition activities were a draw for my daughter. I think it was a successful activity and would definitely repeat it or do something very similar again.

29 January 202415 February 2024

Cloud Dough Valentine’s Day Cupcakes

Have you ever played with Cloud Dough? It has a really fun texture. It can hold together like a dough when compressed, but then will crumble again easily under too much pressure. Cloud dough is one of my kids very favourite textures to play with and they love to pretend bake with it. It’s also very easy to make with ingredients you probably have in your cupboard.

Cloud Dough Recipe

8 cups flour
1 cup oil

Mix 2 ingredients together. That’s it!

The Activity

For the activity, I prepared a few quick recipe cards for “Valentine’s Day Cupcakes” and set the Cloud Dough out with some measuring cups, scoops, cupcake liners, and other small containers.

I included a bowl of pastel, mini styrofoam balls for the “frosting” (from AliExpress), some polymer clay slices for “sprinkles” (also from AliExpress) and some resin candies, chocolates and mini cupcakes (Stars and Sensory, The Creative Mix Shop, and Dollarama).

I also added some wood heart stamps that were a quick DIY. To make them I stacked 2 wooden hearts (from Dollarama) and hot glued them on a wood block.

I put all the materials out on our IKEA Flisat table with a plasticized table cloth underneath to attempt to catch some of the mess.

My Thoughts

Fun – High

My kids love Cloud Dough. They will request I bring it out if we haven’t played with it in a while. They also loved the added texture of the styrofoam balls. My 3 year old son was very content scooping material and adding decorations, while my 5 year old loved following the recipes and then inventing her own creations.

Engagement Time – 1 hr

My kids were very engaged in this activity so they played uninterrupted and mostly independently for over an hour.

Cost – Low

The cost to recreate this activity is low. The ingredients for Cloud Dough are inexpensive and may already be in your cupboard. I used some resin candies and chocolate from small shops that I already had, but you could easily just use the pink and red hearts from Dollarama as add-ins. The styrofoam balls are also inexpensive. I found them to be the best price on AliEpress, but you could also find them on Amazon (they are sometimes called “slime add-ins”).

Effort – High

For me, this is the only draw-back of this activity. It is messy – one of the messiest we do. For me, this means I only bring out Cloud Dough on weekends or days when I have lots of time to clean up afterward. Even though the table cloth on the ground does catch some mess, I ended up having to vacuum when the activity was done. The kids also needed to change clothes when they were done.

Is it worth doing? Yes! I think so. The kids love it and it’s inexpensive to make. Plus Cloud Dough keeps well for years. I’ve had mine for at least 2 years now.

It also has lots of learning benefits.

It’s a great activity for working on early math skills – number recognition, measurement, and an introduction to fractions;
Scooping the dough, frosting and sprinkles promotes hand-eye coordination; and
Measuring the materials and filling (and overfilling) the muffin cups is a great activity for the containment schema (when your child is learning about spacial awareness and how much of something fits inside a container).

Have you tried Cloud Dough? What did you think?

24 January 202415 February 2024

Winter Ice & Fizzy Sensory Tray

The activity

We repurposed part of our last Winter Sensory Play Tray for this activity. The kids weren’t quite ready to let go of the last activity and I like to save effort and repurpose activities when I can. So, I put the tray with the ice slide and fake snow back outside to refreeze and brought it back in when we were ready to do this activity.

I made an ice ring with frozen fruit and evergreen sprigs and some fizzy powder (recipe here). I added warm water, salt and scoops, pipettes and bowls. The kids decided to bring in some winter animals and loose parts.

Review of this activity

Overall, we found this activity to be mediocre. There were some fun elements to it, but some misses as well. Here was our experience

Enjoyment – Medium

The kids always like a fizzy activity, so they jumped into mixing the fizzy powder and water right away. They played with the tray on and off for about 5-6 hours and the play evolved from fizzy play, to melting ice, to making soup, to small world play. However, they found the fruit and evergreen ice ring confusing. They weren’t sure what to do with it and because it was difficult to get the fruit out of the ice, they lost interest in it quickly.

Learning – Low

We’ve done quite a few fizzy activities, so the science wasn’t new to them. We talked about how salt and warm water can melt ice and the kids found that interesting. Most of the learning from this activity involved fine motor skills and hand-eye coordination from working the pipette. So, for us this tray didn’t have a big learning component. That could explain why the kids didn’t find it highly engaging.

Cost – Low

We reused the ice slide and the fake snow from our last Winter Tray activity by storing the tray outside and the ingredients for the ice ring and the fizzy powder were things I had in my cupboards, fridge and freezer. The citric acid powder for the fizzy powder is inexpensive on Amazon and I’ve had the container of bubble bath for over a year – you only need a small amount.

Effort – Medium

There’s weren’t any special skills were involved in setting up this activity, just some planning ahead. I prepared the ice ring a day in advance and the fizzy powder just before doing the activity. The large tray is excellent for containing mess, so there was nothing to clean up on the ground after. The most challenging part of clean up was maneuvering the tray over to the sink to pour out the water (I definitely needed my husband’s help). There was a little spillage in the process, but thankfully water is easy to clean up. That’s why it’s one of my favourite sensory elements for kids activities.

Final Thoughts

I had a few learnings and take aways from doing this activity. I think it would be a good activity for a weekend, or any day when you can leave it out for a few hours. The lack of messiness definitely helped make this possible.

I wouldn’t repeat this activity again in the same way. I really needed to allow a lot of time for the ice to melt in order for the kids to get the most out of it. It took a few hours for the ice to start melting enough to get fruit and evergreens out, even with the help of the salt and water. The kids didn’t have enough patience to stay engaged that long. Next time I make an ice melting activity, I would make the ice thinner – so it’s easier for the kids to melt.

24 January 202415 February 2024

Fizzy Powder Recipe

Fizzy powder, also called potion powder, is really easy to make. Just add water to see a fizzing and bubbling reaction. You can get a similar reaction from combining vinegar and baking soda, but I prefer to use water as the liquid for activity play. It’s easier, readily available, less smelly and a little more friendly for the kids to stick their hands in.

My kids like to use lots of it when we do a fizzy activity so I find it cheapest to make it myself. I usually just eyeball the measurements, it doesn’t need to be exact. Here are the ingredients I use:

1 cup baking soda

1/4 cup citric acid powder (I buy mine on Amazon)

2-3 tbsp Epsom salt bubble bath or dry soap/ bubble bath (mine is from Happy Hippo Bath Co.) *This ingredient is optional, but I find it helps make more bubbles that last longer once the water is added.

That’s it. Pour all the ingredients together and mix. Be careful not to get any water on the mix until it’s time for the fizzy play.

18 January 202415 February 2024

Winter Sensory Play Tray

The kids had a blast playing with this winter activity last night. The set-up was pretty simple. I set the empty Tuff Tray outside on a slight angle and poured some water in. I left the tray outside overnight to freeze. The next day, I brought the tray in, mixed up some fake snow, and brought in some real snow. For the fake snow, I used Snowball Play from Zimpli Kids (Sewing Seeds Play). I filled the tray with approximately 1/3 of each material. Then I added Schleich and Terra by Battat animals, loose parts (winter resin loose parts from Little Play Lab Co., Bauspiel lucent cubes, clear snowflakes from Dollarama), scoops and bowls.

I usually stick to plastic, resin and metal add-ins for wet activities, so they are easy to wash after. Once the kids started playing, they decided to add a bowl of water to the tray for some extra washing and melting fun.

We have done snow and ice trays in past years, but I think this one was the most engaging. My guess is the variety of textures sparked the kids’ creativity and imagination. The ice was a fun slide for the penguins, other animals and frozen figures. The fake snow had a squishy, slightly sticky texture that was fun to mush and mix and the real snow was enjoyable to scoop and pack into bowls. I have a feeling they will be asking for a repeat of this one.