AUTUMN SENSORY BINS

Last year I tried sensory play in my English class and it was a great success. You can read about it HERE. Also, since then I´ve been reading a lot about the importance of providing kids with sensory stimuli, so this year I planned a sensory play lesson for every season (autumn, winter, spring and summer) with my 3-year-olds.

I prepared two autumn-themed sensory bins. The first one was filled with corn and pasta as a base, and enriched with leaves, conkers, chestnuts, walnuts, acorns, pinecones and forest animals’ figurines. I also provided several containers so that the kids could fill them up and empty them as they liked.

The other bin required more preparation time. It was basically stawberry, lemon, orange and coke jelly I prepared at home the previous day. I used these flavours for their autumn colours, obviously.  I made two different-coloured layers in each container which aloud me to insert tiny objects between them and make it even more exciting for the kids to dig their hands in as they would find these little “treasures” (mostly buttons and pointy balls) inside.

We have 25 kids in each class so you have to plan and organize this kind of activities really well. My kids played in each bin in groups of five for about 10 minutes. While 2 groups were playing, the rest were doing something else with another teacher.

To learn about the importance of sensory play you can read THIS.