Sensory Play With Water Bead Bug Sensory Bin

Sensory bins have always been a huge part of our afterschool and summer activities. I’m always looking for wants to make them fun.

But wait your kids are not preschool and kindergarten age. Yup, that is right they are older but STILL love the bins. Each bin provides them a great way to calm down before homework or just great place to play when they need some more sensory input.

Sensory bins are loads of fun and today’s water bead bug sensory bin was a HUGE hit at our house.

Water Bead Bug Sensory Bin - a fun easy sensory activity that kids can have fun exploring with - 3Dinosaurs.com

The Water Bead Bug Sensory Bin is a great addition to the bug activities and sensory bins on the site.

What is a sensory bin?

A sensory bin is typically a plastic tub or container filled with carefully selected materials and objects to stimulate the senses of children in preschool.

Sensory bins might have rice, water beads, corn, beans, or other types filled with small items.

Bug Water Bead Sensory Bin

To make the bin I pulled out all the bug toobs we had. I had some older toobs and newer ones as well. This is a great way to reuse things. We use some of these in a first bug sensory bin.

One fun bug book to go with this bin is: The Icky Bug Alphabet Book. I love having different ABC books to use.

What we used to make the Bug Water Bead Sensory Bin

Ways to Use the Bug Water Bead Sensory Bin

I love just watching my girls pay in the bin. I also love the play in the bins as well. They are always creative in how they play and what they do.

They love pushing the beads and bugs around in the bin. Plus naming all the different bugs they see.

I had fun giving them the challenge to put their hands in and scoop up matching themes for the bugs or to just one bug at a time.

This is fun because they move their hands around in the beads and get loads of touch and feel with this. We had an ant theme and a butterfly theme that they had the most fun with.

Because we had two different sets some of them were similar and different. I had them pick out bugs that were similar and see just how similar they were.

They played a fun game of getting the bugs out of the bin and have them balanced on your hands and not have any water beads. This was loads of fun for them. It took some skill to get the bugs all lined up to take out of the water beads.

Another great activity they did was sorting the bugs in the bin by those that could fly and those that could not. We had a long talk about why they were certain about which bugs could not.

One activity I had them try was searching for one bug in the mix of bugs with their eyes closed. We tried it by keeping all the bugs in and allowing them to take the wrong bugs out. This was fun to see them work together and how having many hands in at the same time did not always help.