Sharla Kostelyk

Peter Rabbit Sensory Bin

I’ve long been a fan of the Peter Rabbit books. Then they came out with a pretty cute movie and a sequel. Now the world has met these cute bunny characters. This Peter Rabbit Sensory Bin is a cute way to expand the books or the movie. Preschoolers can engage in imaginative play with some of the most beloved characters in this adorable Peter Rabbit Sensory Bin. We later used some of these same items in our Peter Rabbit Invitation to Play.

Peter Rabbit Sensory Bin:

Supplies needed:

plastic tub
rice dyed green (get full instructions on how to easily colour rice yourself)
dry beans
Peter Rabbit figurines
fruits and vegetables Toob
carrot cookie cutter
scoops and tongs

Directions:

Dye rice green using these instructions.
Once it is dry, place it at the bottom of a plastic bin to cover about half.
Place dry beans in the other half.
Put the figurines and the other items in the bin.
Invite your child to play.

The Peter Rabbit Classic Collection Peter Rabbit Movie GUND Classic Beatrix Potter Peter Rabbit Stuffed Animal Peter Rabbit Figures A Rabbit’s Tale Felt Figures for Flannelboard Stories Fruits & Vegetables Toob Set of Carrot, Bunny & Bird Cookie Cutters

This hands-on sensory bin provides the opportunity for kids to engage their visual, tactile, and proprioceptive sensory systems.

Because of the bunnies, this sensory bin could also be set out at Easter time. Or it could correlate with a literature study or nutrition unit.

Ways to expand this activity:

Read one of the Peter Rabbit books aloud to your child while they are playing in the bin.
Watch one of the movies together.
Create a Peter Rabbit Playdough Invitation to Play.
Set out real fruits and vegetables for your child to snack on while they play.
Suggest that your child recreate a scene from the books or movies in their play.
For older kids, you can create an entire Peter Rabbit unit study and use these free printable worksheets to go along with it.
Play a Peter Rabbit I Spy game.

Some other sensory activities that may interest you:

Peter Rabbit Playdough Center

Bath Time Theme Sensory Bin

Stretchy Butterfly Slime

June Emotions Printables

By Sharla Kostelyk

It’s hard to believe that summer is almost here! Although the warmer temperatures and sunshine help with mood, it’s still normal for kids to experience all kinds of different emotions. These seemingly simple June Emotions printable worksheets can help so much in terms of identifying those emotions and working through them.

Repetition is important when it comes to learning any skill. Learning about emotions is no exception. These worksheets are a great tool to add. Increasing a child’s emotional vocabulary is a step towards increasing empathy and emotional regulation.

June Emotions Printables for Kids:

June Copywork Emotions Sentences:

Supplies needed:

June Emotions Printable pages (download them here)
pen or pencil OR
plastic sleeve AND dry erase marker

If you want for the sheets to be reusable, simply laminate the pages or slip them into a plastic page protector. Students can then use a dry erase marker to do the tracing and writing themselves. Or they can write directly on the pages with a pen, pencil, marker, or coloured pencils.Copywork Sentences Instructions for the child:

Read the sentence.
Fill in the outline.
Trace the dotted words.
Write the sentence on the lines provided.
Discuss the various emotions.

It may not seem like just copying sentences would lead to anything, but these sentences can do more than practise penmanship. They are a great jumping off point for discussions about different feelings. And they create normalcy around hearing about and talking about feelings.

You can expand the activity by having your child talk about a particular circumstance or time in their life when they felt that emotion.

June My Feelings Log:

Supplies needed:

printed Feelings Log (download those here)
scissors
glue stick
markers, pencil crayons (coloured pencils), or crayons
pen or pencil

My Feelings Log Instructions for the child:

Choose one jellyfish icon each day to colour, cut, and paste into your log.
At the end of the month, you’ll be able to look back and see all the different emotions you felt.
Discuss your feelings with a parent or trusted adult.

These little jellyfish visuals can help your child better identify and work through their own emotions. Then you can take a look and see what they’ve chosen. Once you see HOW they are feeling that day, you can help them dig into the WHY behind those feelings. You can also explain to them that it’s normal to have more than one emotion in the course of a day.

After figuring out what the feelings are, you can work together with your child on strategies for better managing how they deal with that emotion.

Enter your email in the box below to download the June Emotions Printable Worksheets. Print them off to use at home with your child or with your students.

You may also be interested in these resources:

Gross Motor Bug Action Cube

Life Cycle of a Chicken Puzzle (and sensory bin)

Teaching Emotions Toolkit

Alphabet Sensory Bin for Preschool Letter Recognition

By Sharla Kostelyk

Provide a fun hands-on way for your child or student to learn letter sounds with this Alphabet Sensory Bin. Learning the letters of the alphabet is an important early childhood skill. It is a precursor for both reading and writing. By giving children the opportunity to feel the shape of the letters and explore through their senses, you can help cement this skill for them in a fun and engaging way.

Setting up a sensory bin for this purpose is a great hands-on addition to your home or preschool or Kindergarten classroom. It’s easy to set up sensory bins that kids will love. They provide visual, tactile, and proprioceptive sensory input. In addition, they increase a child’s interest and curiosity in learning.

Alphabet Sensory Bin:

Supplies needed:

plastic bin
coloured rice
letters (we used alphabet cookie cutters, wooden ABCs, small alphabet beads, and foil die cut letters)
optional: scoops or funnels

Directions:

Dye rice in an assortment of colours. Read our full instructions on how to easily dye rice. You can also used coloured rice left over from other sensory play.
Toss the rice in a plastic bin.
Add letters. You can use anything shaped as letters. Suggestions include magnetic letters, cookie cutters, wooden letters, foam stickers with the backing left on, Scrabble tiles, foam bath letters, or alphabet beads.
Invite your child to play.

A note about adding multiple types of letters: if your child struggles with the alphabet, it can be best to only include one set of letters to reduce sensory overload and simplify things.

Ways to expand this alphabet learning activity:

Play a version of seek and find. Call out the names of letters and have your child find that letter in the rice. A more advanced variation on this is to display or write the lower case version of a letter and have the child find and identify the upper case match to it in the sensory bin.
When the child pulls out a letter, have them name something that starts with that letter to help them learn about beginning sounds.
Put a paper and crayons nearby so that kids can trace the letters or copy their shape on the paper.
Use alphabet playdough mats to provide another rich tactile sensory activity opportunity.
Set out alphabet books such as Chicka Chicka Boom Boom for kids to explore and compare the letters in the bin to.

Books to correspond with your ABC Sensory Bin:

Chicka Chicka Boom Boom Dr. Seuss’s ABC Animalia (MY PERSONAL FAVOURITE!)Touch and Trace ABC Board Book A is for Apple (Kids Trace-and-Flip)The Handmade Alphabet Eating the Alphabet M Is For Maple: A Canadian Alphabet

Looking for more easy sensory play ideas for hands-on learning? Join us for a free five day email series on Sensory Activities and Solutions and get a free sample of our Sensory Play Recipes eBook.

Sensory Play Resources:

How to Dye Rice for Sensory Play

Huge List of Sensory Bin Fillers and Tools

Over 100 Sensory Bin Themes

What’s the Point of Sensory Bins, Bottles, and Bags?

An Open Letter to School Boards

By Sharla Kostelyk

My daughter was 8 when she started to lose her hearing. We didn’t notice at first because she became so good at reading lips that it wasn’t until we took a family camping trip that I clued in. In the van while I drove, I realized that she couldn’t hear me because she didn’t have those visual cues to help her discern what I was saying. All she could see was the back of my seat. When schools reopen in September, if you require masks to be work by staff or students, you will essentially be asking her to spend the year staring at the back of that seat again. Even with the use of adaptive equipment such as an FM system, she can’t understand what is being said without reading lips.

I know this for sure because of the times I’ve spent in an audio booth with tears streaming down my face as the audiologist said “ice cream” with her mouth covered with a paper and my daughter repeated “baseball”. Watching your child struggle to understand is heartbreaking.

I can’t imagine being in your position and all of the factors that need to be weighed in order to consider when reopening schools safely, but I need to give my daughter a voice. I urge you to also consider those who are deaf or hard of hearing when you sit down to make your new policies.

I have other fears as well about schools reopening as well as do many parents such as kids under heightened stress not being able to learn effectively and I’m losing sleep thinking about all the what ifs.

What if play and hands-on discovery are no longer part of the school day?
What if students are required to wear masks and those with lung conditions can hardly breathe?
What if the students with special needs – those on the autism spectrum or sensory processing disorder or attention deficit disorder or learning disabilities or anxiety fall further through the cracks as schools struggle to meet the physical, emotional and educational needs of even their “in-the-box” students?
What will childhood look like if restrictions continue but also what cost in lives may there be if they don’t?

These are challenging times and I can’t imagine that creating new policies is simple, but please do not make a blanket policy for teachers to wear face masks. To do so would condemn my daughter and others like her to certain failure.

How to Dye Rice for Sensory Play

By Sharla Kostelyk

You can easily make your own colourful rice for sensory play at home or in your preschool or classroom. This recipe for dying rice doesn’t use rubbing alcohol, making it safer in case you have kids who put things in their mouth. Simply follow our instructions for how to dye rice. Rice is one of my favourite sensory bin fillers. I always make extra of the green because I find that it looks like grass which makes it versatile for all kinds of sensory bins, bottles, and bags.

How to Dye Rice:

Supplies needed:

1 cup white rice per colour
1/2 tsp. vinegar per colour
coloured food gel or food colouring
optional: essential oils*

Wilton Food Gel White Vinegar White Rice

Directions:

Put 1 cup of rice in a resealable plastic bag.
Add 1/2 tsp. of vinegar and a bit of the icing gel or food colouring. You won’t get colours that are as vibrant if you use food colouring as opposed to the gel. If you want to add essential oil, add a few drops at this point.
Seal the bag and shake well.
Spread the coloured rice out on a baking tray to dry overnight.
Repeat with other colours.
Use in sensory play.

*A note about the essential oils:

Adding essential oil to the rice will create an extra sensory element as it creates olfactory (scent) input. There are some scents that are calming such as lavender, jasmine, or rose. Other scents are alerting such as lemon, peppermint, or cinnamon.

You will want to choose the essential oil based on what you are trying to achieve. In a setting where you want your child to be learning, you may want to choose an alerting scent. If you are wanting to create more calming sensory play opportunities, then you’ll want to choose a calming scent for the rice. When not in use, be sure to store your coloured rice in a sealed plastic bag or an airtight container. You can reuse it over and over again as long as it’s properly stored.

Ways to use coloured rice in sensory play:

Coloured rice can be used in a variety of sensory play activities. If you use more than one colour at a time, the colours will obviously combine through play and create a different look altogether. That’s not a bad thing, but if you have a child prone to getting upset by things not looking the way they think they should, this is something you should warn them about before they begin to engage with their sensory play.

Here are some ideas:

Use coloured rice in a sensory bottle along with some small buttons or toys to create a Seek and Find Discovery Bottle.
Create a rainbow effect by lining up different colours in a sensory tub. Add some scoops and funnels for kids to explore and work on their fine motor skills by scooping and pouring.
Use green rice to look like grass for insect, butterfly, Spring, or other outdoor themed sensory bins.
Fill a resealable bag about halfway full with coloured rice and then add some small toys or alphabet letters to create an I-Spy type sensory bag.
Layer different colours in a jar or bottle.
Fill a plastic bottle with some of the rice and leave some space at the top to create a music shaker.

Other helpful information about sensory play:

Looking for more easy sensory play recipes to use with your kids? Join us for a free five day email series on Sensory Activities and Solutions and get a free sample of our Sensory Play Recipes eBook.

Ocean Sensory Bag

By Sharla Kostelyk

When you can’t go to the ocean, bring it to you! That’s the sentiment behind this ocean sensory bag. It brings the feeling of the sea right into your home.

Ocean Sensory Bag:

Supplies needed:

small or medium resealable plastic bag
hand sanitizer or hair gel
blue food gel
glue glitter (optional)
Good Luck minis ocean pack
optional: duct tape (blue or mermaid duct tape look nice)

Directions:

Fill a small or medium sized resealable plastic bag less than halfway with hand sanitizer or hair gel.
Add some blue food gel. If you don’t have any, you can substitute drops of food colouring.
Sprinkle in some blue glitter.
Add the mini figures from the ocean pack.
Seal.
Squish to combine and especially to mix the colour in.
Open the bag again to remove any excess air and seal again.
If you want, you can fold duct tape over all four edges of the bag to secure.
Hand the bag to your child to play with.

Whether or not you secure the bag with duct tape, adult supervision should be used as this contains small parts that could present a choking hazard.

This ocean sensory bag pairs well with an ocean unit study. It’s a nice hands-on activity for kids who are interested in learning about sea life creatures. They can explore and discover through finding each of the aquatic animals.

If you want to expand this activity, you can write down the names of each of the items in the bag and have your child find each one and call out its name. They will delight in discovering the sea turtle, starfish, stingray, dolphin, shark, and fish.

Children get tactile, visual, and proprioceptive sensory input while playing with their sensory bag.

Looking for more easy sensory play recipes to cultivate fun? Join us for a free five day email series on Sensory Activities and Solutions and get a free of our Sensory Play Recipes eBook.

Try out some of these other ocean themed sensory activities:

Seaside Sensory Bin

Squishy Shark Sensory Bag

Ocean Sensory Bottle