When my daughter paints I give her a variety of tools: paint brushes, sponges, Q-tips, but she chooses to paint only with her hands. Her goal is to cover the whole sheet of paper with paint so that there is no white space left anywhere. When she has finished a few of her painting, I suggested that she decorates them with something and she chose glitter. She picked yellow, blue and red glitter. Here is the finished product.
I wanted to do science experiments with my daughter for a long time. She is not old enough for many of the ones that I found online but there are some that she participate in. Last time we did an experiment with baking soda and vinegar she was fascinated by the reaction. This time we tried a new thing. The recipe is taken from here. As opposed to last time the mix wasn't hissing but there was a lot more foam this time and it spilled over the edges of the plates.
The recipe is the following. I put baking soda into each of the paper plates and squeezed a little bit of food coloring into each. You can add water to get a more even color. Add a little bit of dish soap to your vinegar. It is important to add dish soap to vinegar and not to the baking soda to get the most foam. My daughter poured vinegar over baking soda herself. It was great that I put plastic tablecover underneath the plates because foam was spilling over the edges of the plates. She loved watching how the colors mixed together on the tablecover.
I was using all new ingredient for this bin: lentils and blue Activa Scenic Sand that I've seen at my friend's house and wanted to try it too.
We have already used many of these forest animals in other sensory bins. A beaver, a wolf and a moose are the latest addition.
She absolutely loved playing with sand. It is not kinetic so there was mess all around the bin instantly and I was very happy that I put a plastic tablecover underneath the bin which helped to avoid the sand spreading all over the house.
My daughter ruined the dam and built it all over again a few times. She also loved pouring sand in acorn caps and feeding it to the toy animals.
I took a regular paper bag, turned it inside out and made a mountain out of it. I painted the top with white acrylics and the river with blue. I left an opening on the back - it was our cave. I taped the mountain to a tray and put green colored rice around it.
First my daughter did not even notice the cave, she just played with the animals. They ate the grass and drank water from the river.
When she got bored with it, I turned the tray around and she saw a cave full of minerals.
I found the recipe for the minerals here but I changed it a little bit. I too
k Himalayan pink sea salt and colored it with food coloring. I squeezed a few drops of food coloring in a zip-lock bag with a little bit of salt. I was supposed to get bright transparent crystals but mine were a little muddy and dark, probably because I was using pink salt instead of regular white salt. I spread them on a paper towel and when they were dry I poured glue from a hot glue gun over them to get them to look like gems.
My daughter took all of the gems out of the cave right away. As she looked through them I was naming gems that I knew of the colors that we had.
I made up a game for learning colors. You can play with kids who are just starting to learn basic colors but I think old kids might be interested in it as well. My daughter already knows colors and I wanted to show her how colorful a forest can be.
I cut out squares of different colors and glued them to a piece of cardboard. I put things that can be found in a forest next to it: leaves, a pine cone, acorn, a chestnut, blueberries, a mushroom, a flower and a few insects.
My daughter took each of the items, named it and put it on a square of a corresponding color.
We have a book "Quiet Bunny's Many Colors" by Lisa McCue that goes very well with this topic so we reread it.
In my next sensory bin elephants are crossing an African wetland. There are plenty of swamps in southern and central Africa. I am really not sure that this specific swamp even remotely looks like African scenery, but since I had quite a few African animals I thought it will work out fine.
I used jello again as it is one of our favorite ingredients. This time I wanted to experiment with its color. I mixed gelatin with water same as I did before and added a few drops of green food coloring. I warmed it up and put it in the fridge. After a few hours, I poured the jello in a bin and added just a little bit of water to it. Then, I squeezed a few drops of yellow, red and green food coloring (just about three drops of each) and mixed it all together with a spoon. Even if you try to mix the jello well, you will not get a smooth solid color. You will still see spots of brown and green and this is the texture I wanted to have because it looks more like a real swamp to me than just plain green jello.
After I was done with coloring, I put rocks, marbles, a tree branch in the bin as well as a few frogs, a hippo, a crocodile and elephants.
First, I gave my daughter a few cups to play with and she poured the jello from one cup to another and back. After that, we played with frogs – they jumped from one cup to another, climbed under rocks and were having sunbaths on a tree branch. Then, our little baby elephant asked his mom to help him get out of the swamp. My daughter helped mother elephant to clean the baby with paper towel. However, he was not behaving; he jumped on the pebbles and felt in the water again. We repeated this game a few times.
My other sensory bins with animal habitats:
African Swamp Sensory Bin
Forest Sensory Bin
Indian and Indonesian Jungle Sensory Bin
Tropical Island Sensory Bin
Farm Sensory Bin
Coral Reef Sensory Bin
Frog Pond Sensory Bin
Arctic Sensory Bin
Desert Sensory Bin
Ocean Life Sensory Bin
African Savannah Sensory Bin
