I love making colored rice sensory bins – but for a St. Patty’s day rainbow bin, instead of taking the time to dye all 6 colors, there’s a great shortcut 😉
Fruity Pebbles!
And while we are on the subject of tasting the rainbow, better add in some skittles and rainbow star sprinkles!
To add some bigger items that won’t distract from this rainbow-colored delight, I added some large shamrocks and pots from dollar tree…
…and to add a great fine motor element while continuing with the rainbow theme, I added some pipe cleaners, lacing blocks, and rainbow stacking pegs!
I think it looks magical 😀 I was gettin all artsy taking pictures lol
Kiddos can use their fine motor skills to pinch, grasp, manuever, and thread the lacing blocks onto the pipe cleaners…
…and stack the pegs into a rainbow tower!
When doing an activity like this in a classroom setting, I like to split the class into two groups – one group can do the sensory activity while the other group does another related activity to encourage connections.
These rainbow pegs were always a HUGE hit! I only took them out for special occasions, because I cannot tell you how exhausting it is to pick up the millions of these little rolling pegs that will drop on the floor…the sound of them tinking on the ground still haunts me hahahaha
But the kiddos LOVE them!
And they are phenomenal fine motor tools…AND they have an engineering component!
Not only are they building using a peg-in-hole design, but by cause and effect, they are learning that a tower can only be so tall before it bends and then falls. They can experiment with how many pegs will keep their tower stable while also experimenting with balancing the peg mat by placing towers in different corners to keep the mat from flipping over!
Think of it as, the better they get, the fewer pegs we have to pick up 😉 lol
Back to the sensory bucket – these pots were a great find! They allow for scooping and pouring…
…pinching, fitting objects inside, and reaching to pull objects out fine motor skills as well as filling and dumping, empty and full math concepts.
And a good time was had by all 🙂
Such a proud little future engineer!
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