our foray into the realm of sensory bins

i've been intrigued by the concept of sensory bins for a while.

they just seem so...cool.

i mean, i want to play with some of them.

but they also seem so messy.  jello, birdseed, beans, rice...tiny and squishy things that i do not want to be cleaning up off the floor.  (if we had a house i wouldn't mind doing some of these things in the driveway or on the yard but alas...we do not.)

so i decided to start simple.  with shredded paper.

i tossed in a couple plastic serving utensils, a horse, a dinosaur, and a cow.  (yeah, so i didn't make an artfully constructed themed sensory bin...)

desmond

but they loved it.






...and then they did this.

tesla

tesla

i didn't get a picture, but by the time they were done, the carpet was covered in tiny bits of paper, and the kitchen had been sprinkled liberally.

plus pieces of paper kept sticking to the boys' feet, and they obligingly tracked them through the rest of the apartment.

so.

was it messy?

YES.  YES,YES,YES.  i fully expected them to dump the contents of the bin out, and i had prepared myself to be okay with it.  however, i did not anticipate the full scale of the mess that would ensue.  thankfully, it was just paper.

was it hard to clean up?

a little trickier than i expected.  i enlisted the boys' help by telling them they couldn't eat dinner unless they assisted me (and yes i would have sent them to bed without the evening meal if they had refused to help).  we scooped up as many handfuls of paper as we could, but there was still so much left on the floor that we couldn't get.  so i had to bring out the vacuum for the rest of it.  not the best thing to do to your vacuum, but i didn't really have any other options.

(it was, however, a piece of cake to clean the kitchen--all i had to do was sweep the paper into piles.)

was it worth it?

well, when i was taking the above pictures, tesla came up to me and said (unprompted), "it's great!  oh mommy, thank you!"



:)

well then.  i suppose it was worth it.

maybe i'll do it again sometime.

next year.