Where Play Meets Potential
If you love all things Autumn and sensory play, but need some fresh new ideas, then you have come to the right place.
We do some sort of sensory play daily. There are days I feel more motivated and have planned ahead, but there are also days I haven’t planned anything and I throw a few things together spur of the moment.
I also love all the things about Autumn. I love the colors, the spices, the pumpkins, Halloween, and the cool weather.
Another thing I love is a good list. So, I have put all these things together for a great list that you can save and refer back to when you are feeling motivated or when you need a little extra inspiration.
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If you are looking for some fun new sensory bin fillers, there are tons on Etsy. I recently got the Fall Sensory Kit from Play at Home Mom Co. and it is so fabulous. We used it in multiple ways. You can check out two ways on my post “Simple Sensory Set up to Support Fine Motor Development.“
Click the pictures below to take you to the products.
Fall Sensory Kit by Ivy House Inc.
This might look like your average sand box, but it’s actually a little snacktivity. The sand is completely edible!
How I made this sand:
There you go, super easy to make a bunch of edible sand. You can really use any blended cereal, oats, grains, or crackers that you have on hand.
Related posts:
I added the leaves and the rake to make a super simple Autumn sensory bin.
Ruby (15 months) liked feeling the texture of the sand and finding the leaves. She didn’t really use the rake too much even after I modeled how to use it.
Funny thing is she didn’t know this was edible sand right away. She played with the sand for a little while before a little ended up in her mouth. Once she tasted the sand, it was all about eating it.
This activity got pretty messy. We did it outside so I could easily sweep up the sand afterwards (actually my lovely husband did that part for me this time, thanks Chris).
This is a classic activity that promotes practical life skills while working on fine and gross motor strength and coordination. It’s also really easy to set up.
Save this one for a day you don’t have much motivation or time for an elaborate set up. It can get very wet though, so prepare to be outside or include a waterproof mat or towel and prepare a change of clothes.
Water play is seriously a favorite in our household and it calms Ruby when she is fussy. It also is a go to activity to keep her engaged for more than just a couple of minutes.
It’s also fun to include different colored pumpkins and different textures of gourds. This offers lots of language and vocabulary opportunities.
You can get more water play ideas HERE.
In Las Vegas Autumn temperatures don’t always come around right away. Some years it isn’t really sweater weather until about November. So when the first day of Autumn is still 100° F, then we do a little spin on Fall activities.
Frozen oranges in orange water is our Las Vegas way to bring in the Autumn season. For this sensory bin you need to plan ahead a bit, but it really doesn’t take long at all and once it is prepped, it is even easier to throw together.
I used mandarin orange slices and I put them in a large ice cube tray. I filled the tray with orange water and froze overnight.
The next day I put them in a bin with orange colored water and some mini pitchers.
Ruby loved this activity! It was especially perfect for her sore teething mouth. This kept her engaged for about 30 minutes as she loved feeling and mouthing the oranges and pouring the water.
I have noticed that the super simple set ups work the best to entertain a toddler.
You can get more water play ideas HERE. Or if you are looking for more edible play ideas you can find those HERE.
These cute little colorful bats were found at The Dollar Tree and are a perfect toy to add to sensory bins for some spooky fun.
The goal of this activity was to transfer the bats from one bin of water to the other to help support crossing the midline.
Crossing the midline has so many benefits for learning and development. Crossing the midline is basically when we move one part of our body (arms, legs, etc.) across the imaginary line down the middle of our body. Crossing over this imaginary line can help develop bilateral coordination (using both sides of our body and brain), which helps with learning and especially with reading.
Autumn soup has become my new favorite water play activity. It is so fun to mix together various ingredients and there are so many ways to modify this activity.
I love to use nature items whenever I can and this activity lends itself nicely for using nature. We included pumpkins, pinecones, and leaves, but Ruby also found sticks and rocks around the yard to add in as well.
Another thing I love to do is incorporate multiple senses into one sensory activity. To make this engage even more than your average water play activity, I added some cinnamon and pumpkin pie spices to some spice shakers.
Ruby really loved to shake the spices into the water. She also dunked the shakers into the water and made a nice cinnamon water to shake around.
The spices really made this soup taste and smell nice and of course the colored water and beautiful ingredients made it look really nice too.
Something really wonderful about a dry sensory bin is that you can leave it out without the worry of a giant mess all around your house. Leaving it out allows your child to come and go as they please. This is so important to support the skill of self-directed engaged learning.
Also, sometimes parents think an activity was a “fail” because their child only spent a few moments with it, but really maybe they were not in the mood or maybe they were interested in something else at the moment. Allowing the opportunity to come back to activity can extend the life of the activity and respects the child’s time and interests.
So, this is a great dry sensory activity you can leave out to revisit. It includes:
Those cute dollar store bats made another appearance. This time in some edible pumpkin play dough.
Since Ruby was putting everything in her mouth (including real play dough) I thought it would be best to make an edible play dough. This play dough feels really nice it would be fun for a child even if they don’t put everything in their mouth.
Here is my approximate recipe (I don’t always measure exactly).
Mix together:
You can adjust this recipe as you need to make it more or less moist.
Find more edible play ideas HERE.
I’m a huge fan of all things pumpkin spice. I love pumpkin beer, pumpkin coffee, pumpkin bread, pumpkin pie, pumpkin soup, pumpkin everything! So, this was a fun twist on a classic.
Ingredients:
Add in some pumpkins (we used fake and real pumpkins) and scoops or cookie cutters and you have a fun sensory activity.
I tried to make mine orange by adding orange food coloring to the oil, but it didn’t turn out super vibrant. I would suggest powdered food coloring if you would like the orange color for this moon sand.
Either way the moon sand had a great texture. It crumbles and sticks together a bit. It’s soft and smells great. Made the whole house smell like fall when I baked the flour and pumpkin pie spice.
My husband even tasted it and said it tasted disgusting, but you would assume otherwise with the way Ruby kept trying to eat it.
This is also pretty messy so I would suggest doing it outside or on a hard surface easy to sweep up. See more edible or taste-safe sensory play ideas HERE.
I love how Starbucks brought back their pumpkin stuff in August this year. Maybe it was a little early, but I love it so I’ll take it.
To create this sensory bin I reused the pumpkin spice moon sand from the previous bin and I added some scoops with some cleaned out Starbucks cups.
Ruby always wants to play with my Starbucks cup, so this was the perfect activity for her.
She loved scooping and transferring the moon sand and I really enjoyed pretending I was having a relaxing coffee date…note the key word “pretending.” I was also pretending there was not a huge mess all around and it was actually nice to not worry about the mess until the end of the play.
To make, simply combine 2 parts cornstarch and 1 part water. To make it extra fun you can also add orange food coloring or some pumpkin pie spice. I added the pumpkins and some scoops to the mix and let my toddler play.
Oobleck has such a fun texture, it is both liquid and solid depending on how you touch it. This allows for lots of exploration and is a great fine motor workout. It is also taste safe, which was good because Ruby kept trying to eat it.
Just be prepared for the mess. It drips down all over, but is fairly easy to clean. If you let it dry you can sweep up all the dried cornstarch or if you are outside (how we decided to play) you can hose everything off pretty quickly.
Oobleck is such a fun texture, we decided to do it another way. This time we did the 2 parts cornstarch and 1 part water with a sprinkle of cocoa powder for the color. Cocoa mud, yum! (Actually it really doesn’t taste good at all).
I think I might have made this one with a better combination of water and cornstarch because Ruby was really fascinated by the texture of the oobleck. She spent a lot of time scooping it up with her fingers and watching as it fell back into the bin, into the pumpkin basket, onto herself, and onto the floor.
I prepared for the mess by placing our waterproof mat under her weaning table and had wet washcloths ready. We had to change her clothes after, but it was worth it.
So farm animals are not the traditional Autumn sensory bin set up, but I feel like many children are going to the farm for the first time when they visit a pumpkin patch. We did visit a farm in late summer, but it also just seems like a Fall type of activity. Either way I have included a couple farm sensory bins in this list.
So, you can have oobleck mud and another way is to create mud with jello. To create this mud I made unflavored gelatin according to the packet instructions and I added red, green, and yellow food coloring to make brown. I put the animals in and let it chill overnight. After it was chilled I added some cocoa powder for some added texture.
I set this up next to a bin of blue colored water so that Ruby could rescue the animals and then transfer them to the water to clean off. Another great way to support crossing the midline (see Bats in orange water for description of crossing the midline).
This kept her engaged for quite awhile. She got pretty wet, but it wasn’t as messy as I thought it would be. If the jello is made with unflavored, plain gelatin then it is not sticky like regular sugary Jello.
If you want to have a sensory bin with farm animals without all the mess, then using shredded paper is a great alternative.
Ruby remembered going to the farm and seeing the horses eating hay, so when she saw the shredded paper she made that connection and began pretending the horses were eating the “hay.”
I honestly didn’t even think about the hay when I made the sensory bin, so that was a pretty cool connection she made. I then gave her the language to use by saying, “Oh yes hay. The horses eat hay.”
And this Poke-a-Dot book is such a brilliant idea. It is so fun to poke the dots and hear the little bubble pop. It’s satisfying like popping bubble wrap and Ruby loves to look at this book on her own for a long time.
Make sure you check out the sensory kits below for great Fall sensory bin fillers. Play at Home Mom Co. has so many great kits that are loosely themed in fun ways like Blippi, princesses, unicorns, and construction. Stop into her store to see all her options.
Click the pictures below to take you to the products.
Fall Sensory Kit by Ivy House Inc.
You might also find these posts interesting:
Fun and Frugal Fall Activities for Toddlers
Simple Sensory Set up to Support Fine Motor Development
What’s the Deal with Sensory Play
Let me know which sensory bin you try out. Or let me know what you like to add into your Autumn sensory bins.
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