Patriotic Sensory Bin and Color Sorting Activity

This week and next we are doing patriotic themed preschool activities for the 4th of July. So far, it’s going very well, and Ezra is having a lot of fun! Ezra has never been a big fan of sensory bins, so we don’t do them often. For a while now I’ve wanted to start working on color sorting with using paint chips, an idea I saw on Pinterest. I combined the color-sort idea with the sensory bin idea and 4th of July theme and came up with this activity.

Materials Needed for Sensory Bin

I gathered everything in my house that I could find that was red, white, or blue:

foam bath letters and numbers (two sets)

magnetic letters and numbers (two sets)

pompoms

glittery foam shapes

(I removed most of these because Ezra got distracted with wanting to peel the backs off of them all!)

cotton balls (which ended up getting white fuzz all over everything)

blue popsicle sticks

(“Can you open wide Mommy? ahhhhhhh….”)

2 random rubber jacks

blocks

patriotic necklaces (purchased from the dollar store)

(currently Ezra’s favorite toy)

monkeys from our Barrel of Monkeys game

dice (the pack I purchased at the dollar store had all three colors)

2 pony-tail holders

buttons

red “flower” coasters

and a few random toys

The point of the activity is just to take the items and put them in the corresponding color basket. Or just to play with the items, name the numbers and letters, and stimulate the senses. Ezra did a pretty good job with the sorting.

I got all of the bins and baskets at the dollar store. If you have these on hand, even better!

Breaks to “make my boo-boos feel better” are a perfectly acceptable part of the activity:

Nose-picking is optional:

If you decide to use this idea, please let me know what else you included, or link to your post if you blog about it! Also check out this post from Growing a Jeweled Rose for a simple patriotic sensory bin idea.