visual motor skills

3 Rainbow Sensory Bins

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rainbow sensory bins

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!
Colors Handwriting Kit

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.

Click here to get your copy of the Colors Handwriting Kit.

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.

Color Matching With Play Dough

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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 🙂

Using Stickers to Help with Scissor Skills

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There are so many fun ways to use stickers for fine motor skill development.

Stickers can be used in scissoring to work on accuracy, scissor control, snipping paper, manipulating the paper to turn corners and curves when cutting.  It can be really tricky for a kiddo to manage all of those areas if they have any fine motor/visual motor/eye-hand coordination…or any trouble area(s) that effects their ability to accurately maintain line awareness when cutting paper.
And for pre-schoolers, it can be really fun to use stickers in a cutting activity.
Anything that makes things different. Or silly.
It makes an activity Interesting!

We used some heart stickers in honor of Valentine’s Day…

(and also because we have millions of them)

to make some curves, squares, and angled lines…and to practice a little cutting!
This little bird stopped by to watch 🙂

What else can you do with stickers when practicing cutting…

~Cut along a line of stickers, like we did.
~Use a sticker only at the corners of an angled shape (the corners of a triangle) to signal when the child should turn the paper.
~Place stickers along the edge of the page, to show where the child should hold the paper with his “helping hand”, and signal when he should move his hand along.  This would be a good guide for kids with trouble coordinating both hands when cutting.
~For the child who needs help knowing when to open/shut the scissors to snip with smooth cuts, place stickers along the line signaling when to open/shut the scissors.  This can be a visual cue to assist the child.
~Using Fiscar scissors (or other scissors that have a smaller thumb opening): Sometimes kids will get mixed up about which opening their thumb goes in when they hold the scissors.  If they are holding the scissors upside down because of this, it can lessen the control they have when they cut.  Place a sticker on the scissors to they know which hole they should put their thumb into.
~Practice scissor control:  Place stickers randomly around a page and have the child cut from the edge of the paper up to a sticker and then stop before they cut into the sticker.
This was an easy and fun little activity!

Colleen

DIY Lacing Cards (from a carry out container!!)

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We had a clean take out container that was just asking to be made into something 🙂

Lacing Cards, of course!

Lacing cards are so important for pre-schoolers and kids of all ages to use in development of so many skills:
 Fine Motor Skills (tripod grasp), Motor Planning (figuring out how to pull the string allll the way through and push it through the other side), Visual Motor Skills (moving along hole to hole), Bilateral Coordination (using both of those hands together in a coordinated manner to hold the card and work the string)…
I asked them what shapes they wanted.  Big Sister chose a heart and Little Guy said his favorite shapes are an octagon or a pentagon (!).
They got started and loved it!
Little Guy needs a little work on the hole-to-hole thing haha!!
He was so into it!
The finished products…
We are gearing up for our 5th Share It Saturday link up…Hope to see you there!

Indoor Snow Play

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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 was a fun indoor play time for everyone!
Colleen

Golf Tee Wreath **25 Days of Christmas Play**

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Day 22 of 25 Days of Christmas Play

Little Guy loves to play with the golf tees and hammer them into egg cartons (Did you see this play idea?)
I had the idea to make a fun wreath that he could make while pounding out some excess energy…
I drew a circle on a pizza box and showed him how to crumble up the tissue paper. He was so excited!

Working on that tripod grasp to hold the golf tees…

Pushing them into the cardboard is a great resistance and muscle strengthening activity for the small muscles of the hands!

Tearing and Crumbling the tissue paper really works those hands too.

He loved following the line with golf tees.  Line awareness and visual motor skills!!

Love this action shot 🙂
Enjoy today and all things it brings!
Colleen

Christmas Water Play **25 Days of Christmas Play**

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Day 19 of 25 Days of Christmas Play

We’ve had this ice cube tray/chocolate mold thing for a few years and have used it to make all kinds of yummy treats.  I had an idea to make ice cubes with it and Little Guy thought that was a pretty good idea.
The snowflake ice cubes have been in our freezer for a few days now and he was very excited when we popped them out.  (He had helped me dye the water green and pour it into the ice cube tray so he knew it was in there, just waiting for a fun activity!)  We put them into a bin of water right on the kitchen floor.  

We decided to make it more Christmas-y and add some red food coloring to the water.  

Chasing those ice cubes around with the ladles and spoons really helps with visual motor skills, eye-hand coordination, and motor planning.
Baby Girl took over after Little Guy moved on to something else.  She played for a while in this.  Look how small the green snowflake ice cubes are! 

We had a great weekend of playing at home, snuggles, laughter, and enjoying every bit of crazy-awesome-chaos!
~Colleen

Christmas Sorting Game

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This Christmas sorting game and ornament sensory bin is perfect for toddlers during the holiday season. It’s a Christmas sensory bin idea that little ones love! Simply grab some baby-safe ornaments (plastic and soft ornaments work!) and put them into a basket on the floor for baby play during the Christmas season.

Christmas Sorting Game

This Christmas occupational therapy activity is a big hit, and it supports skill development, too.

Sort the ornaments by color. Color sorting is great for toddlers and babies.

Day 18 of  25 Days of Christmas Play….
 This busy activity is great for toddlers and babies (supervised!) for color concepts, shape and texture exploration, transferring skills, language development, and so much more!  Grab some child-friendly Christmas ornaments, a basket  or bin, and get ready for some excitement from your tot!


Christmas ornament sort learning game, perfect for a busy activity for babies and toddlers

Ornament Sorting  Basket for Toddlers

 
This day of play involved sorting, matching, memory, and just plain fun!
 
 
We took a few ornaments off of the tree and put them in a basket.  My little guy just loved this game because he has been trying to play with these for weeks now!  All of the ornaments on our tree are fairly kid-friendly, so I figured why not?  I picked two of each color so there could be some matching, some of the same size and some different, some smooth, and some rough.  We had to have a few sparkly too for my daughter:)
 
My 4 year old had fun sorting them by color and sorting them by biggest and smallest…
 

 We also had fun playing a game of memory. I would put a few it the basket and my daughter would take a look, then turn her head and cover her eyes while I took one away. She had to try to remember which one is missing.

 
 
It was also fun sorting them by texture, the ones on the left had sparkles and the ones on the right were smooth and shiny!  This is a great way to work on vocabulary as well as learning about textures for my little guy.  He is learning new words every day and trying his hardest to repeat.
 
 
 
And do babies love anything more than putting things in and out of a basket?!?
 
We had so much fun with this easy Christmas activity!
 
 
 

Find more Christmas play activities in our 25 Days of Christmas Play series

Looking for done-for you therapy activities this holiday season?

This print-and-go Christmas Therapy Kit includes no-prep, fine motor, gross motor, self-regulation, visual perceptual activities…and much more… to help kids develop functional grasp, dexterity, strength, and endurance. Use fun, Christmas-themed, motor activities so you can help children develop the skills they need.

This 100 page no-prep packet includes everything you need to guide fine motor skills in face-to-face AND virtual learning. You’ll find Christmas-themed activities for hand strength, pinch and grip, dexterity, eye-hand coordination, bilateral coordination, endurance, finger isolation, and more. 

Click here to grab the Christmas Therapy Kit.

Christmas Math

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Day 15 of 25 Days of Christmas Play

This one was super easy and Big Sister gave a big “OOOOOoooo, Cool, Mom” when she saw it, so I think that means it is pretty fun…
AND it helps with teaching beginning math, so bonus!

 I had her start by putting the correct number of clips on each decorated circle.  This is a great activity for fine motor strengthening.  Pinching the clothes pins works the small intrinsic muscles of the hands.

Then we did a little simple math…I put two of the circles on the left and asked her what they added up to.
She did pretty well, without needing to count the pins for most of them!  
We also had some Christmas-y fun taking pics for our Christmas card…with lots of out-takes!
It is reeeeeallly hard to get THREE children to look at the camera, smile, and not move for a split second!  
There is not much you can do, besides laugh! I think I got one good shot, though.  Will work on the card and try to share it here, soon 🙂
Fun Times! Looking for more fun ideas to stop, take a minute, and play with the kids this season? Check the Christmas Play tab 
to follow along each day with Christmas themed play!
Colleen