This Dinosaur Sensory Bin is the easiest to make and the best sensory activity for dinosaur lovers! It combines many natural materials and textures with your kids’ favorite dinosaur toys for a fun exploring experience.
What is a Dinosaur Sensory Bin?
A sensory bin is a small set made in a box, plastic tub or glass container that reproduces the dinosaur world. It includes different materials to awaken your kid’s sensory and fine motor skills.
Why are sensory bins important?
The benefits of sensory play and sensory bins are varied. As its name implies, a sensory bin helps stimulate the senses of your little one.
Here are all the benefits of a sensory bin:
- Sensory Exploration: it helps develop all their senses: touch, of course, but also sight, sound, smell, and even taste if you make it edible!
- Fine motor skills: sensory bins help with motor skills, such as scooping, shaking, pouring, stirring, etc.
- Social skills: if you make it with your kid, this bin becomes a social interaction. They might also share it with their siblings or friends.
- Language development: encourage your children to explain what they are doing, detail what they have found, and tell a story about all the dinosaurs they play with.
- Learning: take this as an opportunity to share with your child what you know about dinosaurs. About their size, the time they were on earth, what they eat, what they looked like, etc.
How to make a dinosaur sensory bin?
Dinosaur toys and a box
First, chase all the dinosaur toys and decorations your kid has in their room. It’s a great start as your kid will play even more if it contains some of their favorite toys.
Choose a box, any size would do, I used a 12-inch x 5-inch glass container.
Soft Playdough Grass Area
This sensory box uses my homemade playdough recipe with green food coloring. We stick patches of playdough all over the container to mimic the grass. It’s a great and fun material for a dinosaur sensory bin because the dinosaur can stamp on the playdough and leave dinosaur stamps.
Sand area to dig dinosaur fossil
On one side of the bin, we created an explorer area to dig in some dinosaur fossils. You can use kinetic sand, sand, or soft brown sugar if you don’t have any of the previous materials at home.
Soft brown sugar is soft and its sticky like kinetic sand. It makes it perfect to hide dinosaur eggs or fossils.
Another option is to use shredded paper, it’s a fun and easy material to hide dinosaur elements.
Water
Everything is better with water for kids! Add a little bowl of water on one side of the bin and few drops of blue food coloring to look like a blue lake or ocean. Kids will pretend that the dinosaurs go there to drink.
They will probably empty the water into the bin, ruining your playdough. But they will have had fun!
Play and learn!
This is not only a sensory play activity but also a great early childhood exploring game. You can hide objects in the play dough or sand and ask your little one to use a paintbrush to gently rub the sand and find fossil or dinosaur eggs!
If your kid is around 4 years old, you can use this sensory bin as a playful learning experience! Ask him to count the eggs he collected or tell you more about each dinosaur he found in the bin. It’s a great game to interact with your young one and have fun!
I hope you enjoyed this fun sensory bin tutorial for dinosaur lovers ! Share a comment below if you want to tell me more about how you made yours !
Have fun ! Carine
