Yarn Minion Sensory Bin

Yarn is a resource we have never explored. As we are on our penultimate letter in our A-Z of Sensory Play Series I thought it was time to experiment with Yarn. However, I only had three colours which were yellow, blue and black yarn. Now in our family yellow and blue can only mean one thing – Minions. So we created a Yarn Minion Sensory Bin.

We took a ball of yellow yarn and my son explored cutting it. At this point he didn’t know what we were making. He was simply experimenting with using the scissors on the yarn. I let him use my scissors under close supervision. He cut the yarn to various lengths – some long and some short. I then demonstrated how he could cut several pieces of yarn at the same time.

Once we had a big pile of yellow yarn we moved onto a ball of blue yarn. It was at this point my son made the connection between the two colours and a Minion.

With my help we placed the yellow and blue yarn into a sensory bin. We discussed what we needed to make our Minion complete. My son decided our Minion needed eyes. He decided he wanted to make Stuart the Minion who has one eye. I made an eye using a Pringle tin lid, white paper, brown card and a black permanent marker pen. To make the goggle strap we cut lengths of black yarn. After adding a small piece of black yarn for Stuart’s mouth, our Yarn Minion Sensory Bin was complete.

I gave my son a variety of different fine motor tools in order to explore the sensory bin. These included Cleverstix (training chopsticks), a wooden toaster tong, the Gator Grabber from our Helping Hands Fine Motor Tools set and a Jumbo Tweezer. I set my son a challenge to create another Minion on the table next to the sensory bin. However, he was only allowed to move the yarn one piece at a time.

 

He first tried the CleverstiX. My sons fingers fit into the three loops and he is able to manipulate the chopsticks independently. He was able to pick up one piece of yarn up at a time and place it on the table.

Next he moved onto the Jumbo Tweezer. These proved a little harder as it automatically picked up many strands of yarn at once.

The Gater Grabber worked well too. My son was able to lift up a strand at a time. By now we had a big pile of blue yarn on the table. My son turned his attention to the yellow yarn.

To remove Stuart’s eye my son used the wooden toast tong. However, when he tried to use it on the yellow yarn, he ended up picking up far too many pieces. By now my son had focused for a long time so I let him continue using the wooden toast tong until he had created his Minion on the table.

My son was extremely pleased with his Minion creation. Without realising it he had worked hard with his fine motor skills too. Not only that, we were able to seperate the yarn into the two colour groups and place it back into the sensory bin. My son can now explore his Yarn Minion Sensory Bin over and over again.

 

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