Sensory Bin Take 1: The Weather Bin

I miss blogging guys!!  I have been so lazy and I am finally feeling the motivation and I'm going to try my best to stick with it this time.  When Samantha was 8 weeks old I decided to try out a play group to meet other moms.  We have made some amazing friends and it has been such a wonderful way for us to get out and do fun things.  Recently one of our 53 moms came up with an idea to do a sensory bin train.  Basically, whoever signs up makes a bin and then we get to play for 2 weeks before passing on to the next person on the list.  Our bins theme was winter and it was SO fun to make.  I didn't let Samantha play with it a whole lot so that it would stay looking nice, so I will show off our bin once it makes its way back to us at the end.  There are 15 bins total, so it will be a while!  We did our first rotation this week and I let Samantha try out her new bin for the first time this evening.

Our first bin is weather themed and I have to say, Samantha loves it!

The bin has 6 different cards representing different types of weather.  Here is Samantha transferring rain drops from the bin to a cup.

She did the same thing with the clouds.  We tried counting as she placed each ball in the cup but she is forever stuck on 2-3-5.  Not sure where 1 and 4 got lost but hopefully they will be found eventually!!

She also went searching for a felt sun.

And found rainbows!!  This was perfect because Samantha LOVES rainbows!  She first learned about rainbows in her Signing Time colors DVD and has been obsessed with them ever since.  As a matter of fact, a few days ago, we drew rainbows on the driveway together with sidewalk chalk.

There were also sections for ice and snow.  It was great because Samantha also knows the signs for almost all of these words so we could sign and speak as we pulled out each of the different components.  I am very eager to try to come up with different activities we can do with this bin!  I plan to work more with counting and maybe "messing" the bin up and having Samantha search for each of the different themes to sort and return back to their respective cards.

Our only negative was that Zachary wanted to play too.  Unfortunately these sensory bins are still a little too advanced for him.

I brought this bin out tonight thinking that Zach would be falling asleep and not wanting to play, but unfortunately that wasn't the case.  Thankfully our bin came with a spoon which was perfect for his little hands.  (And a paci for him kept the spoon out of his mouth!)  Zach wasn't happy though, when Samantha realized that he was playing too and took the spoon away.

We were able to come up with a happy medium though where they stood together and Zach played with the spoon and observed Samantha playing with all the pieces to the bin.

We had so much fun tonight playing with our new sensory bin and I have every intention of enjoying it to the fullest for the next 11 days until it gets passed on to its new home!!