Brown and Blue Play Dough, sand, rocks, palm tree food picks, and a bowl of beachy manipulatives were put on a tray for Big Sister and Little Guy. They played with this in our basement in a baby pool we have going on down there right now.
I love how Little Guy put the dolphin in the blue play dough like it was leaping into the water 🙂
What are we learning through play?
Imagination Play
Pretend Play
Fine Motor Dexterity
Tripod Grasp to pinch and sprinkle the sand
Index Isolation and Tripod Grasp to press the little items into the play dough
Kids LOVE rainbow sensory bins! These rainbow sensory bin ideas are some of our absolute favorite sensory bins, and they are the perfect addition to our rainbow activities, rainbow crafts, and a rainbow theme in therapy. Be sure to use our rainbow breathing exercise, too. Let’s talk rainbow sensory play!
Rainbow sensory bins
A sensory bin is a container filled with materials that are designed to engage children’s senses and encourage exploration and play. They can be as easy or as complicated as you like, but the concept is the same- sensory based, tactile play with a theme or play idea with items to manipulate and explore as the user explores their tactile sensory system.
These materials can include a wide range of sensory inputs such as sand, rice, beans, water, or small objects like toys, beads, and stones. Here are many sensory bin base ideas to get you started.
The goal of a sensory bin is to provide children with an opportunity to explore their senses through play. As they play with the materials, they can feel the different textures, see the different colors, and hear the different sounds they make. This can help to promote their sensory development and stimulate their curiosity and creativity.
Sensory bins are often used in early childhood education and therapy settings as a tool for sensory integration therapy, which aims to help children develop and organize their sensory systems. They can also be used at home as a fun and engaging activity for children to play and explore.
We’ve been playing with a rainbow theme alllll week around here. These are three rainbow sensory bins that we have been exploring.
Any time that I pull out the corn bin, everyone gets very excited. I added ribbons in different colors and some “gold coins” (aka yellow Connect Four game pieces!)
Another little sensory bin that we’ve been playing with is a simple bowl of these Fuse ‘M Beads.
I added a couple of pairs of tweezers and an ice cube tray and let them go at it!
This was a fun fine motor activity, but mostly they just loved running their hands through the beads.
Baby Girl loved exploring these little beads.
((These are really little, so if you play with these…or any little parts…keep an eye on your little ones if they tend to put things in their mouths. Baby Girl does pretty well and won’t put things like this in her mouth.))
This last sensory bin used the Fuse ‘M Beads again. The next day, I put the beads and some cotton balls (clouds) into a big ol’ bowl and added a melon baller and kitchen tongs.
More fine motor skills and sensory play combined into one colorful activity!
We hope you get some good ideas from these sensory bins. have you done any fun sensory bins recently?
If you are setting up a rainbow sensory bin, be sure to grab a copy of our colors handwriting kit. There are many items in the printable kit that can be used in a sensory bin to challenge letter writing. It’s a great colorful addition to rainbow play!
Rainbow Handwriting Kit– This resource pack includes handwriting sheets, write the room cards, color worksheets, visual motor activities, and so much more. The handwriting kit includes:
Write the Room, Color Names: Lowercase Letters
Write the Room, Color Names: Uppercase Letters
Write the Room, Color Names: Cursive Writing
Copy/Draw/Color/Cut Color Worksheets
Colors Roll & Write Page
Color Names Letter Size Puzzle Pages
Flip and Fill A-Z Letter Pages
Colors Pre-Writing Lines Pencil Control Mazes
This handwriting kit now includes a bonus pack of pencil control worksheets, 1-10 fine motor clip cards, visual discrimination maze for directionality, handwriting sheets, and working memory/direction following sheet! Valued at $5, this bonus kit triples the goal areas you can work on in each therapy session or home program.
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 was an easy and fun way to spend an afternoon. And when Baby Girl woke up from her nap, she loved it too.
I put out six colors of play dough and a little bin of colored beads, paper clips, and other little things.
Fine Motor Strengthening for kids
They had so much fun matching up the colors. Baby Girl just loved pushing the little beads and things into the Play Dough.
I love her little knuckle dimples 🙂
Pushing the little objects into the dough is resistive and an excellent fine motor strengthening exercise for little hands. They are also working on their tripod grasp when they push the beads into the Dough.
Big Sister said we needed to wash all of the little objects after we were done. We put all of them into a bin of water and everyone had fun swishing them around.
Drain them into a colander and you are good to go 🙂
Fine motor play for toddlers is a win in our house. Toddlers seem to love moving, scooping, dropping, and sorting items, so why not incorporate fine motor skills into the activity?
Looking for more creative ideas for toddlers? Try these ones.
Fine Motor Work for Toddlers and Preschoolers
This activity is so easy to put together and fun for different ages. My Toddler and niece and nephew (both 16 months old) were immediately loving this one. They saw the pile of crafting pom poms and the bottles on the table and were instantly popping the fuzz balls into the empty water bottles.
NOTE: If you try this activity with little ones who love to explore with their mouths, please keep a very close eye on them. Or put this one on hold for a few months.
Pushing the pom poms into the bottles is great for working on a tripod grasp, and the littler kids tended to push the ball into the bottle by using their index finger (Index Isolation).
When kids develop isolation of individual fingers, it improves their dexterity, separates the sides of the hand, and allows them to manipulate small objects with accuracy.
As they progress in fine motor development, you will see the ring finger, and pinkie finger fold down into a fist as they use just their thumb, pointer finger, and ring finger to manipulate little objects. The ring and pinkie fingers are then able to stabilize the hand during activities such as handwriting, cutting with scissors, and shoe tying.
Color Sorting for Preschoolers
Little Guy (who is 3) sorted the different colored pom poms into bottles.
We had fun with this for a long time. They were occupied before and after nap time with this one!
To get the pom poms out of the bottles, I was able to pull them out quickly. The little kids were not able to get them out, but it was not too difficult for Big Sister.
Bilateral coordination for toddlers is part of development and this plastic bottle and craft pom pom activity is a great tool to support this sensory motor skill.
The toddlers had a little trouble at first, managing the bottle with their helper hand while concentrating on putting the pom poms into the bottle top.
This is a really great activity to work on bilateral coordination for little ones. After a while, they both got better at it.
That was pretty neat to see. It really helps, too, that the bottle made a loud crinkly sound when they squeezed too hard. What a great auditory cue for them to lessen their grip on the bottle.
Don’t have the pom poms at the house??? Use cotton balls.
There is something about kids and a pile of shaving cream…They Looooove to play in it!
We added some old sprinkles from last Easter to give this Indoor Play Idea a different twist. They loved feeling the texture of the sprinkles on their hands while they played. It probably has a great exfoliating factor too 🙂
Grasp Strengthening and Learning Colors With SNOW???
Some days, it is just HARD to get the kids dressed up in snowsuits/gloves/hats/boots/scarves…only to bring them back in 10 minutes later because the baby wants to follow the big kids, but can’t pick up her boots to walk through the snow that is up to her mid-calf…so she stands still in the yard until I pick her up…
Today was one of those days.
We needed an activity for after baby-nap-time and before dinner-making-time and this was just the one!
I had this idea in mind since right after Christmas when we got some snow, and I wanted to dye it using eye droppers. After looking everywhere around the house, I just can. not. find the eye droppers! So, on to another idea…
Turkey Baster
Spray Bottle
Scoops and Spoons.
These kids were so beyond excited to see me setting this up. They helped stir the food coloring into the bowls of water. (Get Dollar Store food coloring for projects like this! So cheap, and it will last you many, many projects…) But they could not guess what we were doing with it. Once I brought the snow in, there were cheers!
We did some mixing of colors on the snow…What does red and blue make? We had green in the spray bottle and it was fun to change the stream to get more color on the snow. They were pretty excited to get brown, of course 🙂
Squeezing the turkey baster bulb and the spray bottle nozzle is wonderful for grasp strengthening in hands.
The strength of the whole had is needed for so many fine motor work in play and school based activities.
This was the extent of the mess…not too bad! They kept the tray on the right pretty clean of color mostly since that was Baby Girl’s side and she was busy eating the snow 🙂
This hammering golf tees activity is one of our oldest blog posts here on the website. I loved showing my toddlers how to use a toy hammer with golf tees in an egg carton. This is a wonderful fine motor activity for kids, and one that is very motivating for all ages!
Hammering Golf Tees
Counting Manipulatives and Fine Motor Skills
I picked these golf tees up earlier this year during a shopping trip, figuring we would use them for some activity…or actual golfing 😉 They were only a buck for 100 tees. We have these hammers from a Melissa and Doug toy and I thought we could use that to hammer the tees into some egg cartons.
Little Guy used the golf tees (or Golf Teeth, as he called them), to count out how many he needed for the egg carton, learning to count out manipulatives.
He’s working that tripod grasp to hold the tees, pushing them into the egg carton for resistance, building those intrinsic muscles for fine motor dexterity.
Little Guy LOOOOVED this activity! He said, “Mom, when I grow up, I am going to do this because I’m going to be a Dad and Dads hammer.” He has been asking to do the “Golf Teeth Hammer Game” every day, several times a day, ever since.
Look at that Tripod Grasp. This is such a great activity for pre-writing and working on the correct and most efficient way to hold a pencil.
These are needed for so many functional skills in play, dressing, handwriting, shoe tying.
You could do this with a cardboard box or Styrofoam. Putting it on an incline or vertical incline would add an extended wrist for improved grasp on the tee.
We will be doing this activity again, for sure!
Want to work on more fine motor skills with fun and engaging play activities? Grab one of our fine motor kits!
Working on fine motor skills, visual perception, visual motor skills, sensory tolerance, handwriting, or scissor skills? Our Fine Motor Kits cover all of these areas and more.
Check out the seasonal Fine Motor Kits that kids love:
