Feely Bin

A little twist on the traditional sensory bins with a “Feely Bin”.

A mess free, food free sensory bin? Why yes please! My idea behind this bin was to give my toddler a chance to investigate different items and the way different material feels. This wasn’t a tricky sensory bin to put together – in just a second I made this fun feely bin.

Setting up the feely bin was so easy!

Materials:

• basket
• various items of different texture

To make this  bin, I put a few items into a basket that had different textures. I didn’t spend much time gathering items – this was a quick fix activity to get me a moment to drink my morning coffee. Basically, the time to prep this was the time it took the pot to brew. Hey – coffee is the life blood of moms. I make no apologies.

Anyways, I went hunting for items that were smooth, rough, flexible, hard, soft, etc. I placed them in a small basket and let my son (25 months old) explore the textures (while I drank my coffee in peace). He only lasted about 5 minutes working his way through the basket BUT he did come back to it throughout the day AND it was a big hit with 6 month old – the wax paper is apparently delicious.

I would definitely make this again with my baby in mind and just remove anything paper that she could potential break a piece off of.

In the bin, I had sand paper, tissue paper, wax paper, foil, construction paper, ribbons, a cloth, cling wrap, bubble wrap and cardboard. That’s a mouthful. Anyways, as I sipped my life blood coffee, we talked briefly about each texture and ways to describe them.

In the future, when he’s older, we will use bins like this to discuss properties of solids, but that science lesson is way in our future – at least I can get the ball rolling on those descriptive words now AND finish my coffee. This feely bin was a good little morning activity for us!

What would you add to a feely bin?