Our winter sensory bin

This past fall, we started some very laid back homeschooling.  I shoot for an hour a day, but some days even that is hard to squeeze into our busy life.  She's 3.5, so I'm not in any huge rush to do anything too scheduled.  We mostly do it for fun.  We do lots of coloring, painting, book reading, puzzles, etc outside of our "official" school time.

One of the things I really wanted to do was sensory bins.  I looked around online and got some ideas, then got to searching for goodies!  It's just a big box filled a little more than half way with rice.  I keep two funnels and a scoop in there, and will be switching out the trinkets monthly/bimonthly, depending on what ideas I can come up with.

This is our second box, a winter box.  I started with a fall themed one with silk leaves, autumn colored plastic jewels, big wooden beads, wooden acorns, plastic gourds, and some other things.  I need to find pictures of it.

My 3.5 year old will sit and play quietly for up to an hour!  It's so nice to have something that will occupy her for that long.  I set it up on the kitchen floor, so that clean up is easy if any rice gets out of the box.  Sometimes I sit and play and let the baby dig around in there and she loves it too!

Now that there is snow on the ground, I took the fall items out and replaced them with foam snowflakes, blue and white pom poms, blue and white glass beads, some winter themed ornaments and buttons, and will still be adding things as I find them.  I have some large pearl beads I'm going to add, and I want to find some small penguin figures.

 Her first introduction to the new box - She loves it!