Bee Sensory Bin {Spring Sensory Bin}
Buzz into spring with this fun bee themed sensory bin. It’s a perfect spring activity or anytime you’re learning about bees.
Sensory bins are great for home or a preschool setting and kids love this type of hands on play.
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Sensory bins are a great way to help kids explore their world.
Setting up a new one can help engage your kids for a longer amount of time so it’s good to change it up periodically, especially when you need to keep their attention.
This is how we made our bee sensory bin but feel free to add or change things to make it your own.
Sensory Bin Materials
I would start first by checking your local dollar store. You can often find inexpensive filler for sensory bins there. We used the following:
- Bin (use anything that’s available)
- Resin Bees or Felt Bees
- Flat paper flowers (Printable provided)
- Yellow pompoms
- Wood shavings
- Tongs
- Honeycomb ice tray (to serve as the beehive)
How to make this honey bee sensory bin
1 – First lay down your filler. We used wood shavings, like what you would put in the bottom of a hamster cage.
You could also use yellow rice, check out our rainbow rice bin for how we dye rice. You could also use the yellow pom poms as the filler in a larger quantity.
For a different look you could use green easter grass filler.
2 – Next add the honeycomb ice tray and some paper flowers or fake flowers. If you want to make some quick paper flowers you can use this template.
3 – You can add all the pom poms and bees loose in the bin or set a few out and put the rest in little containers.
4 – Now it’s time to play!
Kids may also enjoy making this cute bee bracelet to go with the bumble bee sensory bin.
Play Ideas
Moving things with the tongs
One of the simplest ways to play with this bin is to just explore by moving things around with the tongs.
Using the tongs to pick up the bees and pom poms is a great activity for developing fine motor skills. Those fine motor skills will be essential once kids start learning to write.
Counting
You can easily use this sensory bin to work on counting with kids. Ask them to put three bees in the honeycomb, or three bees on each flower.
Use different numbers to help them practice those counting skills and one to one correspondence.
Help the bees pollinate or make honey
If you want to get a bit more bee focused you can talk briefly about pollination or making honey and use the sensory bin to demonstrate it.
Place yellow pom poms on each flower. Fly the bees to the flower grab some pollen and take it back to the hive.
You could also demonstrate pollination by putting yellow pom poms on one flower and orange on the other and have the bee pick up one color and carry it to the other.
I hope enjoy this fun sensory bin!
