Sensory Bins

Just a few pictures of different senory bins in our classroom.  I'm hoping to keep this updated and post more pictures as the year goes by.  Let's start with something simple.

Shaving Cream!

Desert habitat.

Painting rocks with water.

Water marbles.

Sea Animals in water.  This smelled horrible!  Never try real starfish in water. Bleh.

Ice Castles: ice, salt, and watercolor!

Studying precipitation and clouds with shaving cream and drops of food color.

Magnets

Felt Food

Pictures of felt food I made for our classroom:

Pictures my colleague, Ms. Shyleigh, made to go with the book Build a Burrito:

And our classroom pizza making kit:

Penstemon Water Coloring

These are a collection of penstamon watercolor paintings that our classroom made for our school's silent auction.  Penstemons are a native wildflower that grows around Tucson.  This would work well with any type of flower. 

In my opinion, it's the similarity and the contrast between the pictures that make them so striking!  We were very fortunate to have a parent that was a wood worker and was happy to make us two wood walls hangings that we glued the individual watercolors onto. The pictures were glued onto the wood blocks within the frame and the individual blocks are all different widths.

To keep all the colors from blending together, we made these in steps.  The first step was to draw a picture of the wildflower with a sharpie.  I asked the children what they noticed about the flowers and its parts while they were drawing. Then in stages I gave them the colors, which is how they ended up not all becoming brown! 

First I gave them pinks in a few different shades and introduced the words hues, and shades, and had them notice the differences and similarities in the colors.  I asked them what part of their flower was pink and let them paint until the were ready for the green shades.  Then they were given about three different shades of green, when they where done, they have three shades of blues/teals for the background.

When making an item for an auction, as a teacher, I am always conflicted with the process vs. product dilemma.  I normally strongly believe in process rather than the product or outcome.  However, for pieces like this that you sell to parents you really do want a product, right?  I tried to make it more open ended by giving them a variety of shades and not telling them where to put the colors, but encouring them to notice it on their own. 

I even made color copies and laminated a poster for my classroom to keep.

Paper Bowl Jellyfish

Toilet Paper Roll Owls

Owls made from paper toel rolls and scrap fabric samples. 

Beach Craft

We created these beach scene's during our summer ocean unit.  The children really enjoyed making them and playing with them afterwards.  

The ocean was made from one part shaving cream to one part white glue, then I added liquid watercolor. 

The sand was glued on with white school glue.

I used cardboard for the base.

Here are step-by-step instructions:

The children first painted half the cardboard with glue using a paintbrush.

They took handfuls of sand and covered the area that had glue on it. Then shook off the extra sand. 

I let them decorate their beach with shells 

And rocks. 

They used a large spoon and cover the second half with the shaving cream/glue mixture and spread it around.

I let them pick out one crab and one sea animal for their project.  We talked about where each animal would prefer to live and why.  We talked about crabs being able to go on land and sea and they choose where their crab wanted to be.

We glued down the animals. 

Children picked out their umbrellas and towels and decided where one the beach they'd like to sit on their beach and glued those down.

Waa lah!  Insto-beach!!!

Sea Shell Collage Sailboats

These sail boats are made from a collage of natural items I mostly found around the school. We did them while we were doing an Ocean unit during the summer. The sails are made from abalone shells and have a beautiful irredesent shimmer to them. Okay, that part isn't exactly a local resource here in Tucson, but the mesquite pods and sticks are!

Felt Flower Pots

These amazing flowers and pots match together by color to promote one to one correspondence.  One to one correspondence is a critical skill that children need to master in order to be able to move on to more formal math.  It sounds like an easy skill to be able to match a number with the amount of parts, but for young children it can be quite challenging.  In early childhood education it is something that we are constantly working on throughout the school year.  The best way to encourage children to learn is through inviting materials and through play.

I even want to play with these gorgeous flowers and their pots!

So very pretty!

These flower pots were made by a colleague and are located in Ms. Shayna's Wild Things classroom at St. Mark's Preschool and Kindergarten.  St. Mark's is located midtown in Tucson, AZ.