Using an inflatable pool as a sensory room DIY ball pit for sensory play is one of our favorite ball pit activities for toddlers and babies. In this blog post, we’ll cover why and how a baby pool sensory space is so much fun.
If you have little ones in the home, you know that baby toys can quickly take over the home. That’s where this baby play area in the living room comes in. We used a baby pool right in the living room for a kiddie pool ball pit. It was a fun way to create a baby play area without taking over the whole house. We could keep our ball pit balls contained (slightly).
If you’ve ever wanted to set up a calm down corner or even a sensory room, then having an inexpensive way to create a calming ball pit is ideal. That’s where this Sensory room DIY ball pit comes in!
You could use this baby pool ball pit idea in the home, in a mobile therapy practice, in an occupational therapy clinic, or other space. For young children, a great calming tool that supports learning, social participation, and school tasks is a space to chill like a ball pit.
A DIY ball pit using an inexpensive material like a baby pool can be a great sensory strategy to support emotional regulation needs in children. It’s a place to calm or re-organize.
Sometimes the easiest way to bring some fun into the day is to just switch things up!
Bring something unexpected into play.
You should have heard the cheers and excitement when I pulled the baby pool up from the garage and into the living room!
All you need is two items:
An inflatable baby pool
Plastic ball pit balls
You could use a hard shell baby pool as well, but it’s nice to deflate the baby pool and put away the DIY ball pit occasionally!
Everyone immediately climbed in.
And out.
And in…
It’s that easy to provide an instant boredom buster!
Looking for more INDOOR play ideas? We love simple yet effective baby play activities designed to promote development, cognitive skills, learning, and baby brain building.
Or check out any of the ideas under the Kid Play tab above!
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.
Let’s cover a few different directional concepts; This over, under, around, and through activity for preschool is a spatial relations concept. These positional concepts are an important part of preschool development.
Teaching Directional Concepts: Over, Under, Around, and Through
Learning Spatial Concepts during play
One rainy pre-Halloween day, I had an idea to bring a pumpkin into our play. We were going to play a game teaching Spatial Concepts.
What are spatial concepts??
It’s those direction/spatial relationship/preposition words that tell you where something is related to something else… you know… beside, in front of, behind, over, under, around, through, last, etc.
These are great concepts to teach to preschoolers.
Positional concepts are especially important in pre-handwriting. Once they begin handwriting, kids are taught line awareness, placement of letters on the top/middle/bottom lines, how to move over a space between words, how the “y” has a tail that hangs below the bottom line…So many times, a messy hand-writer is showing problems with spatial organization and concepts.
Spatial concepts and directional terms are also important in teaching shoe tying…BIG need for understanding “AROUND the loop”, “push the lace THROUGH with your thumb”)…
They can begin learning these concepts by discovering where their bodies are in relationship to objects.
We pulled the couch cushions off of the couches and set up tunnels, bridges (cushion over a blanket…use that imagination!), and obstacles.
My kids love the couch cushions…There are definitely days that we use the couch cushions more on the floor than we do actually on the couches.
I started singing to them, “Where is pumpkin? Where is pumpkin? Here I am, THROUGH the tunnel!” to the tune of Where is Thumbkin, and changing the last line depending on where the pumpkin was that time.
Teaching Over, Under, Around, and Through
You totally don’t need to use a pumpkin for this…you could use a stuffed animal, action figure, apple…whatever would spark your child’s interest!
We changed it up after a bit. And for something different, I would tell them to first go over the bridge, then go around the cushion wall, then go through the tunnel.
They loved going over, under, around, and through obstacles to get to where the pumpkin was. And then making up their own sequence to get to the pumpkin.
Baby Girl just enjoyed going over cushions.
Pretend Play with Spatial Concepts
Big Sister and Little Guy decided to change the game into a pumpkin patch, complete with a cushion “tractor” to take them to the pumpkin patch and some stuffed animal “kids” to join them.
The stuffed kids got to ride the tractor…
And go into the pumpkin patch.
And pay for their pumpkins with “coins”.
Real-world application of the spatial concepts we learned???
“Cuddles the Bear gets to go in the pumpkin patch in front of Puppy, because she is pink, and that’s good manners”.
Ok, then.
More Preschool Spatial Learning Activities
Want to continue the spatial concept learning with your preschooler?
Add music…Sing and act out “Over the river and through the woods”, “Going on a bear hunt”, and “The bear went over the mountain”.
Grab a basket or container of any kind. Toddlers love putting things “in”/taking them “out”. Add more complexity for bigger kids by adding multi-step directions. “Take 5 steps forward, go under the chair, then crawl around the blanket”.
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.
This is the first post in a series of indoor play ideas. Winter and cold, snowy, freezing rainy days are right around the corner (right outside???) and there are so many fun, education-through-play activities that can keep all ages from boredom and mass chaos (aka children) from tearing through the house…
for at least 10 minutes.
We had a few days of rain from post-Hurricane/Tropical Storm/Frankenstorm Sandy in this area. Between school cancellations and cold, misty rain, we played mostly indoors this last week. I made up a ton of ideas for our school cancellation day, and we were able to get to several of them.
So many of the play invitations that I set up for them spin off into hours of their own pretend imaginary play ideas. And then they want to play the imagination scenario again in the afternoon. And then keep the play invitation (i.e. sheets on the canopy bed) set-up for days. Weeks?
There may currently be sheets hanging on the feet end of Big Sister’s bed posts 🙂
I hung a bunch of blankets up in Big Sister/Little Guy’s shared room. This is a shot of Big Sister’s canopy bed, with sheets strung up from the posts. Hint: Use fitted sheets to get them to stay up. For weeks?
They were in love with this idea! As soon as they saw it, Big Sister called it “the Bucky ship” (from Jake and the Neverland Pirates). They immediately climbed aboard and started playing Pirates, complete with sharks below them on the carpet. They played for over and hour at this (and then most of the afternoon), pulling all kinds of toys and stuffed animals into their play story.
Imagination play boosts creativity, self-confidence (acting out characters of all kinds), social and emotional abilities, language skills, relationships. And it’s fun!
Baby Girl entertained herself (and me) with an awesome game of peekaboo in the sheets.
“Baby Shark” (Oh, the characters that she plays…and has no idea she is playing) had a blast with this box of teethers and rattle toys that I have packed up and ready to go into the attic.
(speaking of the attic…) I am FINALLY putting my tank tops and shorts up into the attic and pulling down the sweaters. The kids have had their warm clothes out for a while. This busy Sugar Aunt has been rocking the layered look for the past couple of cool months 😉
It’s the perfect time of year to get the indoor play ideas stocked up for the super cold weather months ahead!
I love this apple balance beam that we made years ago. It’s a gross motor coordination activity that targets areas like motor planning, balance, coordination, core strength, and sensory motor input, all needed for development! This gross motor apple activity would go really well with our apple sensory bin and our Apple Therapy Kit.
Apple Tree Balance Beam
Making an apple tree balance beam is an easy activity that you can do at home to work on skills with young kids!
This Apple Gross Motor Activity is the perfect way to introduce learning about the color Red and Apples this Fall with toddlers, preschoolers, and babies. We made our own life-size apple tree (well, make that Toddler-life size!) that kids can really climb and develop gross motor skills while learning. We’ve recently update our Toddler Play page with all of our play ideas in one place. Your Toddler will love some of the other creative play ideas we’ve shared in the past.
Gross Motor Apple Activity for Toddlers and Preschoolers
So, two days a week, I have my nephew here with us while my sister is working. That makes a 5 year old, 3 year old, 1 year old, and 11 and 1/2 month old. We had a Red/Apple play day one afternoon, with something for each age to love! (This post contains affiliate links.)
Even with two children in two different stages of preschool (3 y/o class and Pre-K), it is easy to supplement school lessons at home (and keep the babies occupied). Keeping the activities PLAY makes learning fun. They never know that you are actually teaching so many ideas (turn taking, manners, colors, handwriting, developing motor skills…& so much more)!
This time of year, it is all about apples in preschool. My 3 year old is learning all about red, apples, and circles in his class. We pulled those concepts into our play with this fun apple tree activity. I placed this set up on our living room floor and had the kids pick ‘apples’. We counted them as we put them into baskets. My 5 year old loves writing when I spell out a word, and so we worked on writing the words “red”, “apple”, “circle”, and “tree”. She was “in charge” of simple math ideas (We have two apples in the basket. Adding one more apple makes 3 apples).
The babies loved putting the red balls into baskets, taking them back out and then putting them into a different basket. They are learning through exploring!
We did some Gross Motor balance beam play on the “trunk” of the tree. This was a hit for all of the kids. These babies WATCH the big kids and try their hardest to keep up!
Gross Motor skills are tasks that require the large movements of the body. Development of gross motor movement is important for so many play skills of childhood (riding a bike, throwing and catching a ball, hopping, skipping, climbing). Developmentally, we refine our fine motor skills after and as a result of, appropriate gross motor skills. For example: Stable shoulder girdle strength is needed to produce controlled fine motor control needed to hold the pencil and write in a small area.
Baby Apple Theme and Red Learning Activities
The big kids did a few more motor tasks including tossing the balls into the baskets. The controlled balance needed to stand on the balance beam, while tossing the ball into the basket is really working their eye hand coordination and can be a challenge for many kids!
(The babies had a blast carrying the baskets around).
We went on a search for red toys, keeping with the red theme. These were put into a pretzel tub that we keep to store the baby pop-beads.
Babies love to manipulate objects, explore how they can move objects…love to see what they can do to a toy (chew it, bang it, throw it…). And then see if they can do it again!
Baby Girl is always putting these stacking rings onto her wrist. She’ll walk all over the house with one on her wrist, just like a bracelet. My other two never did that at this age! Is she a future fashionista??? Have your babies done this???
The babies loved pulling red objects out of the bin, chewing on a few, putting them back in (…pulling them away from each another, grabbing it back with a screech…these two cousins are more like siblings…LOL)
This is a great opportunity for language development. Say each item that baby has. Babies, at this age, love to hear your voice in different pitches. Describe to baby the details of a toy, pointing out interesting parts. Talking constantly to baby truly does wonders for their language development.
We finished up with a snack of sliced apples for the big kids and applesauce for the babies.
This post was originally posted in 2012. We’ve recently updated to share with you again!
