Fall-themed Sensory Bin

Toddlerbot loves sensory bins. His first experience with them was our water bead bin during our bug segment over the summer. Moving into Fall (today being the first official day), we decided to work on our new sensory bin last week.

Over the last few weeks, as we've worked on our mindfulness on our walks to and from the park, we've been gathering things we've found in nature, and observing how trees are changing. Toddlerbot has collected different kinds of pine cones, different stages of acorns, branches with dried pine needles, and sweet gum seeds. We talked about how these are seeds for the trees to grow new trees, and the tree life cycle. And more recently, we've had a lot of fun crunching fallen, dried leaves. We've even been walking in a straight line for maximum crunch factor (and balance practice).

After collecting all of our goodies, we decided to dye some rice yellow, orange and red and leave it to dry in the sun. We also took a trip to Dollar Tree for some items we needed to round out our bin. You can see the finished product below!

The little foam pumpkins won't rot before the season ends in late December, but you could absolutely use real pumpkins. We also got fake leaves to reuse in crafts later, and because the the real thing would disintegrate pretty quickly. Lastly, we got paper shreds in Fall colors from the gifting section to simulate the crunch and feel of dried leaves (it works really well, actually). We were pretty happy with how it all turned out!

Parents.com: Halloween Lists!

 On my birthday this year, Parents magazine posted their Top 21 Kids' Halloween Movies and Where to Watch Them. As a huge Halloween nerd, the Nightmare Before Christmas begins it's rotation on September 1st. This year Troy has been watching it 1-3 times a day, despite finding Oogie Boogie creepy. He doesn't want to watch "Hucus Pucus" but I'm hoping to rotate in a few of the other titles on this list. He has enjoyed Coco in the past, so I have that going for me.

In the same topic, Parents also published a list of 14 Easy Halloween Crafts for Toddlers. We are homeschooling for preschool this year, so I'm going to plan to make all 14 of these crafts between now and Halloween! We'll update with photos when we make them.

Thanks, Parents!

Scribble Spot Sensory Jar

We have been reading at least one book from the Little Spot of Emotions Box Set every night at bed time (we do 1-3 books per night). Our little guy is experiencing some emotional management issues, and we're trying to help him give words for his feelings so he can talk out what's wrong instead of having a meltdown.

Previously we read the Color Monster Pop-up Book almost every night, but as he's gotten older, I feel like it's important we are going into more detail about what each feeling is to help him understand them better. I also wasn't crazy about how the book had children put their feelings in bottles without opening them up and talking about them (disclaimer: I have not read the non-pop-up version of the book).

After reading A Little Scribble Spot about ten times, I got the idea to make a sensory jar using a recipe I found the first time we made one, and adding some of our own flair to it: water beads. Troy is obsessed with water beads, and they automatically make every activity a million times more fun for him. Adding beads this time worked perfectly with the spot theme, and the colors were pretty spot on.

To make your own Scribble Spot Sensory Jar, you will need the following:

• a clean jar with a water tight lid (we recycled a peanut butter jar)
• water (we use hot because I do the mixing; proceed with caution)
• clear liquid glue
• glitter (we used green for calm, but feel free to adjust for your primary/focus emotion)
• about 1/2-1 cup of pre-soaked water beads depending on your vessel

1: Place your clean, open jar on a flat surface that can be easily cleaned after wards (because glitter alert). Fill about 3/4s to 4/5s of the jar full of hot tap water. Add a generous portion of clear liquid glue (we use about 1/4 of a cup, give or take). Stir until dissolved (I usually cap the jar and shake it).

2: Add glitter (I did the glitter for ours). While adding the glitter, we talked about how the color green was our calm/peaceful* feeling. Feel free to add additional colors to represent other feelings, or even larger glitters like stars or hearts.

3: Let your little add the water beads (fine motor skills!). We talked about the different emotions represented by the "spots" we were adding.



4: Tightly cap the jar and ask your child to give it a shake. Share observations about how it's hard to tell what color is what when everything is shaken up and mixed together, ask them to name the emotions they see in the jar. Explain that when they're feeling all mixed up, they can come shake their jar to give them time to calm down.



*In the Color Monster book, green is for "calm". In the Scribble Spot series, it's "peaceful".