Chicken Sensory Bin

Today’s prompt for sensory play was to include recycled materials! Excellent for us because we really love to play with stuff from recycle bin! We set up a fun and cheap sensory bin we created completely from recycled items – chicken sensory bin!

How to Prepare Chicken Sensory Bin?

For a sensory bin setup, we used:

1. shredded paper (brought back from office, recycled)
2. bottle caps from milk bottles
3. plastic capsules from kinder egg surprise chocolate (if you live in US, you can use plastic eggs)
4. barley we had on hand for chicken food
5. plastic bin
6. empty egg cartons

I have placed barley inside plastic capsules and placed each in a bottle cap. Shredded paper pretended to be hay. And on a side, I have placed 2 large egg cartons.

Now, we just need the chicken or mom hen!

How to Make Mom Hen / Chicken?

Materials needed for each mom hen:

• paper roll insert
• orange and brown construction paper
• pair of googly eyes
• glue

To make mom hen:

1. Cut beak from an orange and wings from brown (or any other color) construction paper.
2. Glue beak on front part and wings on the side of the paper roll.
3. Glue googly eyes above the beak.

You can see on an image how mom hen should look after done:

How Kids Played with Chicken Sensory Bin?

First thing kids did when I called them for a play was to shake eggs and make sounds with them. (They came back to this at the end too – rolling capsules on the floor in between them like they would do with a ball!)

Next was to open all capsules (eggs) and dump barley in bottle caps. As they did this, they placed empty eggs on an egg carton.

For some time, they pretended they are feeding their chickens with barley and at some point, “hay” and barley were all mixed and kids played with paper shreds. Some of them even ended in a kitchen waiting to be cooked!

When kids were done playing, we packed shredded paper for another play occasion.

Do you have any ideas how else we could play with shredded paper? We would love to hear it!

What to Play Next?

• take a nap under the umbrella
• workout little fingers with carrot fine motor activity
• enjoy painting with shaving cream!

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