January 18, 2016 - The OT Toolbox

Have you tried making a sensory bottle yet? These a super easy and creative ways to encourage learning through a calming visual sensory tool. We’ve shared awesome ways to make them and have a great new idea to bring you today, and just in time for Valentine’s Day: this heart waterbead sensory bottle! It’s a great Valentine’s Day activity to add to your therapy toolbox.

I love sensory bottles to use as a calming and quieting sensory tool. My kids love making them and the fun of discovering items in the bottle. When you add a learning component like math or literacy it’s even better!

Valentine’s Day Sensory Bottle

Full disclosure: This post contains affiliate links.

We made this discovery bottle very quickly one day. I had a bunch of pink and rose colored Waterbeads
ready to go. I poured them into a big bin and had my kids help me fill the bottle.

Depending on the age of your child, you may want to prepare the sensory bottle yourself and just present the finished tool to your child. My kids had a blast playing in the water beads and placing them into the bottle, though. It was a sensory experience in itself!

We used a regular peanut butter plastic jar that had been cleaned out. (Get the kids in on the cleaning job too!)

Use any combination of Water beads. You can find them in the dollar store in the craft section or many large stores in the floral section. I love grabbing a bunch of different colors at once, though and get them online here. It’s hard to find a lot of different colors in the stores, so online is easier for me.

RELATED POST: How to Make Awesome Discovery Bottles

Fine Motor Water Beads Activity

Have the kids fill the bottle with water beads for a fine motor activity. Manipulating the Water beads and dropping them into the bottle is a nice way to encourage in-hand manipulation and tripod grasp.

Once the bottle is 3/4 full with water beads, add a handful of foam hearts. Kids can slide these into the sensory bottle.

You can add superglue to the lid of the plastic bottle if you are worried about little ones opening the bottle and dumping the contents. We just used ours as is and did not glue the lid shut. This way, we could have a nice storage container for the water beads and play with them again.

Now play! Shake the jar and count the hearts. Ask your child to find all red hearts or all pink hearts. Use this sensory bottle as a calming tool when kids need to focus or attend.

RELATED POST: Alphabet Discovery Sensory Bottle

Looking for more Valentine’s Day sensory bottles? Stop by and see what the Discovery Bottle team have created this month:

Color Mixing Sensory Bottle | Preschool Inspirations

“Full of Love” Calm Down Jar with Printable Calming Affirmations | Lemon Lime Adventures

I Spy Love Sensory Bottle | Modern Preschool

Alphabet Discovery Bottle: Valentine’s Day Activity for Kids | Sunny Day Family

Slow Falling Hearts Sensory Bottle | Rhythms of Play

Heart Glitter Jar | Fun-A-Day

Let us know if you make a Valentine’s Day sensory bottle! I would love to see your version.

Looking for more sensory bottles? These are our favorites:

Alphabet Discovery Bottle

Math Dominoes Discovery Sensory Bottle

Colleen Beck, OTR/L has been an occupational therapist since 2000, working in school-based, hand therapy, outpatient peds, EI, and SNF. Colleen created The OT Toolbox to inspire therapists, teachers, and parents with easy and fun tools to help children thrive. Read her story about going from an OT making $3/hour (after paying for kids’ childcare) to a full-time OT resource creator for millions of readers. Want to collaborate? Send an email to contact@theottoolbox.com.

My kids are hungry all the time. So, when we made this Avocado Black Bean and Orange Zest Lettuce wrap, and they were actually full for more than an hour, I was a happy mama. We made this easy lunch recipe using a fun ingredient: Orange zest. It is part of our Cooking with Kids A-Z series and Z is for Zest!

It’s hard to believe that we’ve cooked our way through the alphabet while cooking with new ingredients and exposing my kids to new foods. We’ve come up with new favorites, like our Carrot Veggie Puffs and have tasted and shared some old family recipes, like our Apple Dumpling recipe. We’ve made bread dough, snacks, and main meals. It has been a fun year of cooking and I’m excited for the next phase of this project. For now, try cooking your way through the alphabet with great recipes from A-Z!

Avocado Black Bean Lettuce Wrap with Orange Zest

This post contains affiliate links.

This recipe is so easy to through together. It’s one that we’ve made before, with different versions. Today, we added orange zest, and the result was crisp and tasty. My kids called the zest our secret ingredient!

For this recipe you’ll need a few ingredients:
Iceburg Lettuce (or any large-leaf lettuce)
Black Beans
Cherry tomatoes, quartered
Avocado, diced
Zest of 1/2 orange

Pull apart a few large leaves from the outside of the head of lettuce. Place the lettuce leaf on a plate until ready to build your wraps.

Prepare the black beans, and place them in a dish. Chop the tomatoes. Kids can do this with a child safety knife. Peel and slice the avocado. Once sliced, avocados are a great food for young chefs. It’s soft enough for easily slicing. Add the tomatoes and avocados to the bowl. Zest the rind of 1/2 orange. My preschooler loves zesting oranges and remembered the last time we did this task (and we don’t often zest oranges!) We used our standing box grater
to zest the orange, and this worked well for my 4 year old. She could stabilize the grater with her non-dominant hand while zesting the orange with her dominant hand. Older kids could use a classic zester.

Now it’s time to build your lettuce wraps. Load up the lettuce leaves with as much or any combination of the avocado, black beans, and tomatoes. Sprinkle the orange zest on top. We found that with the citrus-y touch of the zest, we didn’t need any dressing at all in our wraps. What a filling and low calorie dish this is!