Dinosaur Sensory Box

Sand, dinosaur toys and a bit of greenery from the garden.

James is quite interested in this at the moment. He's been very playful with it, putting his hands and feet in and giggling, waiting for me to 'bury' his feet and help him make prints with both the dinosaurs and himself!

Truck Sensory Box

I am very averse to sandpits. I am hardly a domestic goddess but we have had a couple over the years and I have found them quite stressful to manage. I think the combination of the boys inability to keep the sand in one area, their desire to eat it as soon as my back was turned and my inability to remember to put the lids over them on rainy days was just too much.  I did however, relent a little a couple of years ago when I saw this purple sand, bringing it out in small amounts on trays which has worked a lot better for us.  So when I was scraping around for something to load our truck with today, this is what we ended up using.  Sadly it was the last bit and there wasn't enough so I mixed it with some red lentils.  We also threw in a few lolly sticks as an extra thing to 'load up'.  We rolled our smaller trucks through it to make tracks and we loaded the big yellow truck up with a small trowel, adding the word 'in' as we loaded up, which resulted in James running around the garden shouting 'in in in'!

Planes and Helicopters

These are some plane/helicopter activities we've done recently for our transport theme.

A plane sensory box made from a blue sheet, cotton wall balls and toy planes and helicopters...

I found myself talking about little fluffy clouds so put that on the iPad whilst Charlie was playing with the box. He was happy to play with the box as it was whereas James needs more focus so I tend to ask him to put the planes in and out which he is happier with.

Some very messy shaving foam clouds and planes!

Helicopter Potato Prints (Dad's idea)

Some play dough helicopters, I made the helicopters and got them to put the blades (lolly sticks) in....

Pastry planes! We have the tiniest plane cutter so made these little pastry cutouts.....

We've also finally got our display board up which is great as its important that we have visual clues as to what we are learning about around.

We also found a couple of great songs and rhymes which the boys really enjoyed doing. We came across loads of versions of 'I'm a little Airplane' to the music of 'I'm a little teapot'. The words were not quite right for the lads in any of them so we rewrote it to suit our language needs and put in signs. We also found an instrumental to accompany it on YouTube on the iPad which really is turning out to be a very useful thing to have.

I'm a little Airplane

I'm a little Airplane

(sign plane)

Watch me fly

(sign watch and fly)

From Down on the Ground

(point to down)

To up so High

(point up)

First I get all revved up

(put arms out to side)

Then I can fly

(Start moving slowly)

Off the Runway

(move faster)

Up into the sky

(run around like a plane on tiptoes!!)

The other rhyme we used, 'The Airplane' was from here and we used that one pretty much as it was. The boys loved these so we are keeping them going through our transport theme and adding more in as we go.



Christmas Sensory Box

This is supposed to be a Christmas sensory box - it does smell Christmassy but I think it looks autumnal! 

It contains :-

A bag of mixed nuts
Bag of walnuts
Cinnamon sticks
Dried orange slices
Christmas scented pine cones

James helped to make the orange slices.  He's quite into helping to do fruit and veg at the moment and its a great way to get him exploring different foods without the pressure of having to eat them.  He licked a few bits of orange doing this. I say, 'Mum cut, James put IN' and he puts the items in the baking tray!

With the sensory stuff, I tend to just encourage exploration of the textures and smells.....

 but my mum got James putting a nut in each section of a little plastic cake tray which worked really well!

Wheat, Wool and Waterwheels

We started our week (which ended up stretching to a fortnight) by visiting Dunster Mill which is just gorgeous. 

James and Charlie were really interested in the waterwheel and mesmerised by the waterfall at the side of it. They weren't so fond of the creaky machinery inside the mill but I guess to them it was all pretty dull and dusty.

We bought some of the mill's own flour and then had a walk along the river a bit and into the gardens which are attached to the castle where there was also lots of flowing water to look at and lovely trees.  We (the grown ups) learnt that the river that the mill is on is called the River Avill and are beginning to realise how little we know about certain things in our own area!

So what did we do with the flour? Well, we did the obvious things first.  Baked some bread and cakes...

 ....but this really led onto a much more basic sensory experience of the flour as Charlie just wanted to put his hands in so we went with that,

then expanded it to add water and play with it wet.

We also made some papier mache, which both boys really got into at the beginning stage being actually allowed to rip up paper for once!

We made glue with our flour and made papier mache shapes by filling cookie cutters and pressing them out.  We may get around to painting them next week...

We also visited Coldharbour Mill which is a much bigger, industrial waterwheel where they spin yarns.  This has led to some interesting sensory experiences for the boys.  The lady kindly gave us some wool tops for them to hold but they were almost fearful of the feel to start with. Over the course of the visit they got used to it though and quite enjoyed the feel...for a while! 

They seemed to really enjoy looking at the waterwheel and machinery in action here.  There was also a felting exhibition going on which we thought they would like as it was big, bright coloured textures, but they didn't - we can never predict these things!

The other thing which really caught Charlie's eye was the chimney.  He loved looking up at it.  I think we may have to do some work on tall towers as he's shown an interest in this sort of thing previously.

I though I would buy some different bits of unspun wool and yarns in the shop to fill their sensory box but Granny already had a collection of different types to give us!  I couldn't resist buying this though - for myself. I've just learnt to knit socks!!

 I made up the sensory box with Granny's stash and it's been really hit and miss.  Sometimes we DO NOT want to touch it at all,

 other times, we don't just want to play with the sensory box, we want to BE the sensory box!!

I guess this tells us a lot about how sensory preferences don't have to be fixed.

I'm feeling slightly (only very slightly!) obliged to attempt some sort of literacy with the boys at the moment, so we made these woolly 'w's with the wool. I just used the back of a cereal box to draw a 'w' on and got them to spread the glue on and choose some bits out of the sensory box to stick on.

We also tried some bubble wrap felting.  I 'felt' they would be happy enough with this activity as it involves a lot of banging.  James did not like touching the wool but joined in with the banging and rolling happily.  Charlie was entranced by the whole process. It was impossible to take photos and do this at the same time as hands were everywhere, but here are the end results....

The greatest success of learning about waterwheels though has been after me suddenly noticing the night before we started this (I can be a bit slow off the mark sometimes!) that one of our 'Bob the Builder' books was about an old water mill, both James and Charlie have been willing to sit down and look at it with us and in fact have repeatedly asked for it to be read again and again.  Result!

Confetti Cards and Sensory Box

These couple of ideas were inspired by my dad's wedding back in September.  We made some cards with coloured rice, plain rice and confetti.  I sprayed the cards with spray craft adhesive and then the boys just sprinkled the decorations where they wanted. (The rice is made by mixing dried rice with either food colouring or poster paints and leaving to dry.  Some colours WILL come off on hands!!!)

They seemed to really like the sprinkling so I thought I'd just put the rest in their sensory box for a week or so to play with.  They've enjoyed the coloured rice for a long time but the confetti added an extra dimension and it led to some really good communication with lots of requests for more dramatic sprinkling!