Sensory Table

I have always had a love-hate relationship with sensory bins.  I love that the kids have a great time playing in them but have always hated the amount of work that is involved in the setup and put away of the activity.  A few months ago, a friend of mine was heading to Ikea and I asked her to pick up a child's table for us.  I didn't want to spend a lot on the table because the girls still colour off their pages and I didn't want to have to worry about them ruining the table.  This is where this fantastic find comes in!  Ikea has now come out with a table that has a cover for two sides of the table to give it a solid top but you can open them to store supplies inside.  I decided to turn these containers into sensory bins for the kids.  It's the perfect solution!  When I want them to play with the sensory activity ,we open up the bins and they have a great time; but when the activity is done we just put the lid on and use it as a regular table!  For the past few months the big boys and I have been searching through Pinterest and coming up with great sensory play ideas.  The older boys are actually quite interested in helping with the set up and purchasing of all the items for the different themes.  They also like to play with it first to make sure it's set up right for the little ones :)

Mathew and I changed both bins out this weekend.  We set up a Halloween themed side and an autumn side.

The Halloween side is just a mixture of beans with spiders, pumpkins and measuring spoons that can be used for scooping.

 


The autumn side has some treasures that Mathew hid amongst the bird seed for the little one's to find.  There are leaves and fall treasures hidden in there as well.  We also decided to put a little pouring pitcher and some additional spoons for scooping.

Joshua has used the new set up for the past few days but it was the first time I let the girls play with it!  They absolutely loved it!  All three littles were laughing and shrieking with excitement and the mess stayed rather contained (we vacuumed up some beans afterwards of course but it was quite minimal).

I now have to come up with a storage idea to store the contents of the sensory bins that we have rotated out hahaha.

Love this picture of their little feet trying to go up as high on their tip toes that they can to reach better :)