TV is glorious.
I love to watch it. Bean loves to watch it. And as such, our daughter loves to watch it.
She would stand at the coffee table and watch it for 4 hours straight if I let her. Have I mentioned she is not even two years old?! Her favorites are Mickey Mouse, Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood, and sometimes Doc McStuffins.
The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends no more than 2 hours of screen time each day (all screens- phones, iPads, and TV combined), and zero screen time for children under age 2. Yikes!
I'm always on the hunt for activities that take up more than an hour and that do not involve the TV. I already limit her TV time by only watching in the afternoon, turning it off when a show is over, and trying to fill her time with other things. I ran across something called a sensory bin on Pinterest and realized it was exactly what I needed to make for Abby to play with. Until now, the best afternoon time taker was going on a walk to the park, but with the bad weather, we are out of luck on that for awhile. I remember playing with a rice station in Kindergarten- using a funnel and scoops and it was a blast!
So here it is! The St. Patrick's Day Sensory Bin!
I bought about 14 pounds of rice from the dollar store and Kroger. It was half the price at Kroger. A 10-lb bag was about $5, and each pound at the dollar store was $1. I divided it into gallon zip bags, one for each color of the rainbow.
Then I added food coloring. I wasn't sure the gel would work, but the tutorial I found said to add a couple of tablespoons of vinegar in with it.
It looks so gross! I guessed on mixing colors like orange and purple. I also added essential oils to the bags with certain colors. Purple got lavendar, orange got sweet orange, and yellow got lemon.
Lots of shaking and kneading, and I got my colors! I love the purple- up close there are some pieces that are either red or blue, and overall they are both.
Bean made this stand to hold the bin out of PVC pipe. It was pretty cheap, about $30 and took about 30 minutes to fully assemble. I arranged the colors so they would be pretty for a picture. I hid cheap coins in the rice, and more of the shamrocks.
She was so excited when she came over to it! She was slow to warm up, not sure what to do with it. She poked it a few times, started using the smallest teaspoon and delicately scooped it up and poured it out. Soon she was mixing the colors and eventually figured out to dig down with her hands to find the coins and shamrocks.
The colors all mixed together and it looks like fruity pebbles. The rice that falls out, we sweep up and throw it away. The scent has lasted longer than I thought. She requests to play with it. I plan to add some clear letters and numbers made with hot glue in the future so she can try to fish them out and we can talk about them.
This has to be one of my favorite things I've done as a parent / wannabe teacher.
0 comments:
Post a Comment