Play and Learn Every Day

Olympic Inspired Sensory Bin

08:30

It's almost time for the summer Olympics and we are so excited. The last summer Olympics were in 2012 and they were here in London, we took Ethan but he was only 9 months old so he doesn't really remember it! This time around we'll just have to watch from home, but we're doing lots of little activities to learn about the games. It's a great opportunity to learn about different countries and sports! So we're starting with a sensory bin inspired by the Olympic rings and the talented athletes.

What you'll need:

sensory material (rice, pasta, chickpeas, oats, buckwheat, etc)
red, green, yellow, blue and black paint
ziplock sandwich bags
large bucket or tray
small red, green, yellow, blue and black bowls
little people toys

I used buckwheat as a base for our sensory bin, because I'll be honest with you, my family does not like buckwheat! I bought roasted buckwheat and buckwheat flakes and tried it in all sorts of different recipes with no success, so of course we couldn't let it go to waste and have used it in our sensory bin. This bin would work just as well with rice, pasta, chickpeas, oats or any other sensory material that can be coloured. We used the same technique to colour the buckwheat as we've used for pasta by separating the buckwheat into ziplock plastic bags and mixing it with paint, then leaving it out to dry on trays.

Once the buckwheat was dry I put each colour into its corresponding coloured bowl and placed all of the bowls into a large shallow bucket arranged in the pattern of the Olympic rings. I then added a few little Happyland athlete toys that we had (but any people will do).

Then I put it down for the children to explore. The first thing that they did was to pick up the athletes and have them run around the sensory bin a few times before putting them into one of the coloured rings.

Then as they started exploring they had long jumpers jumping into the bowls of buckwheat and swimmers swimming through them. The runners and wheelchair racers were whizzing around the buckwheat and finding their way to the finish line.

And then they decided it was time to dump out all of the bowls and mix the colours together! The colours look really lovely together and the kids had so much fun exploring the buckwheat and picking up handfuls to let it run through their fingers.

They pretended that it was rain and the rain was falling on all of the athletes doing their sports. Ivy really enjoyed playing with the colourful buckwheat and stayed exploring it for ages.

We are looking forward to the Olympics even more now and can't wait to learn more about all of the nations that are competing and all of the events that the athletes are participating in.

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2 years old

Messy Me Splashmat - Review

10:43

We love messy play! It's so great for the kids to be able to explore different materials and learn through their play. I'm actually not too keen on the aftermath, but I know that they benefit so much from it so we do a lot of messy play. So of course I was excited when we were offered a splashmat from Messy Me to try out and do some messy play on.

It is a lovely big mat made of oilcloth and works on a table as well as on the floor. I chose the olive grey mat with a star pattern as it is quite neutral and wouldn't take away from the bright colours of our activities. The mat is really nice and I've decided to use it mostly on the floor to give us lots of space to play and give the kids freedom of movement. I've also decided not to use paint on it as oilcloth can get stained, and it really is too lovely to stain, so we'll be using wipe clean materials only.

It's great for putting out on the floor with lots of paper and crayons and an assortment of other creative materials. The kids love stickers so we've always got those around and as the mat is so nice and smooth it's great for pattern rubbing boards as well.

We've also used the mat for play dough that we were making dinosaur footprints in. It's great when you've got a few kids over for a play date and don't have a table space big enough, I just put it out on the floor, gave each of the children a ball of play dough and some dinosaurs and they all kept busy and all of the play dough stayed on the mat. Such easy set up and clean up, perfect for busy groups of kids.

It's also great as a base for sensory bins and other sensory play. Ivy does tend to make a bit of a mess with beans or rice getting all over the place when she plays, but of course I don't want to discourage her from exploring. So by putting out the mat we keep the mess more contained and I can just pick it up at the end and pour all of the beans back into the sensory bin.

We are really loving our Messy Me splashmat, it makes it so easy to set up activities on the floor for the kids to do and to keep their mess more contained. I'm sure you'll see it in a lot of our messy play photos from now on!

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* This is a review post, we were given a Messy Me Splashmat to use and write our honest opinions about.*