We celebrated our first storytime of the new school year today. Yaay! After a break from programs in August, I am super ready to get things rolling again. I always struggle a little though with my first storytime. I want it to be perfect and to, essentially set the stage for the whole year. This is a really silly thing to worry about. As I've learned (and should remember but never do) some storytimes are great while others don't always go according to plan. And it's always fine.
So this year (with only a small amount of worry) I decided to kick off storytime with a variety of sensory bin activities. I've taken a lot of workshops and read a lot of blogs about sensory bins and it seemed like such a simple activity that kids can't seem to get enough of. For those of you who don't know, a sensory bin is a plastic tub filled with fun items that engage a child's senses. It can be anything, really. Some examples I've seen are dyed pasta, leaves, water beads, sand, etc.
I created seven different sensory bins. Seven bins might seem like a lot but with a storytime group, you never know how many kids you'll have. I wanted to make sure that, even if we had a large group, everyone would be engaged in the activity. Well, as it turns out, I needn't have worried about too many kids. We only had six. But I'm glad in a way because it allowed me test drive the different bins and really see which ones were more popular than others.
Before we got down to the business of playing, we read some books first. I mean, it is storytime after all. Since I had such a broad spectrum of items in my sensory bins, I decided to forgo the theme idea, which is usually how I roll. Generally I like to read books about a certain topic and then do a craft or activity with that topic in mind. That wasn't really going to work today, so I decided to read books that featured the library. So we read Library Lion by Michelle Knudsen (an amazing book by the way) and Homer the Library Cat by Reeve Lindbergh.
Once we'd read, we got busy playing. So without further ado, here are our sensory bins!
This is the colored bean sensory bin. I took plain white beans that we had left over from a previous summer reading and placed them in a Ziploc bag with about 15 drops of food coloring. I sealed the bag and shook it until all the color was dispersed. I spread the beans on a paper towel to dry and then added them to the tub with some little plastic dinosaurs. 
This is the water bead sensory bin and it was a big hit, as I figured it would be. Water beads are these wonderful, slimy little things that are so fun to put your hands in. They start out as hard little bee-bee type things and you put them in water and several hours later, you have water beads. I added glitter to this batch to add a little sparkle. I brought this bin out after the kids had had a chance to play with all the other bins because I knew that once this one came out, everything else would be forgotten. I also added some shaving cream to this when I brought it out. It made a big mess but nobody seemed to care. 
This is our alphabet sensory bin. I found some foam letters, numbers, and squares at a dollars store and then I added some alphabet pasta. I asked the kids to find certain letters, such as the first letter of their name. This was a new and fun way to talk about the alphabet 
This is the rocks and shells sensory bin. The rocks are aquarium rocks and the shells are from a craft store. I added some plastic cups for scooping and some plastic snakes. The kids really enjoyed this one. I think it was the scooping that they really liked. 
This sensory bin is made with Epsom salt that I dyed with red food coloring in a plastic bag, the same way I did the beans. I added glitter, little heart shaped cookie cutters, and medicine spoons to use as scoops. This one turned out really pretty with the added sparkles (I think I have a glitter addiction). 
This bin is filled with plain old sand and all the kids ran toward this one first. You can really never go wrong with sand.
Finally, we have the yarn and pipe cleaner bin. This might have been the least popular but it still got some action. The kids had fun stringing pony beads on the pipe cleaners and yarn and making necklaces and bracelets. Overall, I would conclude that the sensory bins were a big hit. One little boy told his mother that he didn't want to go home when she said it was time to go. I plan to keep my sensory bin materials handy so that I can bring them out again another day. Sometimes it's nice to take a break from crafts and just let kids play and exercise their imaginations.
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