BIRD WEEK SENSORY BIN

We did lots of fun stuff around here for Bird Week and I can't wait to share all of it with you, but I have to start with our nest-building sensory bin because it was the biggest hit of the whole week for sure.

I bought a few things at Dollar Tree and had a few things here, but all in all it cost about $6 for the whole thing, and $6 for hours and hours of fun pretend play is money well-spent, if you ask me!



We use one of those giant under the bed storage containers for our sensory bin. It's the perfect size for us--we need lots of room for splashing and digging and exploring. K is a pretty neat kid--she's never been much for throwing or dumping everything on the floor, so I've never really worried about large quantities of sensory materials.

This week I filled our bin up with:

• brown, crinkly gift bag filling material
• raffia
• ribbon scraps
• feathers
• yellow, sparkly tiny styrofoam eggs
• yellow plastic Easter eggs 
• a small colander
• a cute little birdie with a clip on the bottom (Dollar Tree find!)
• 3 little pom-pom baby birdies (instructions for those coming--just scroll down)
• Giant kid-friendly plastic tweezers and some pink pipe cleaners cut up into wiggly worms 

Kinley filled the colander with the nest-building supplies to make nests for the bird family out of all the other bin supplies and spent hours "hatching" eggs and feeding baby birdies worms with the tweezers (because who wants to touch a worm?! :) ) She made up stories that lasted whole entire hours and brought other things from around the house to add to the nest and make sure her baby birds were happy.

I knew she would have fun, but it was an even bigger hit than I thought it would be. If you are planning a bird week at your house or in your classroom, I totally recommend this bin.

Oh, I almost forgot to give you instructions for baby birds!

You will need:

• 2 pom-poms for each bird (you could make a momma bird this way, too, with bigger pom-poms)
• hot glue
• orange or yellow craft foam
• black puffy paint

One pom-pom is the head and one is the body, so you will just hot-glue one on top of the other to get started.

Then, cut out a tiny craft foam triangle beak and hot glue that on.

Almost done--just use your puffy paint and make two little eyeball dots and let it dry! Voila!

Kinley loved being able to put her baby birds inside the Easter eggs and help them hatch. She even had her stuffed Chica from The Sunny Side Up Show on Sprout sit on her eggs most nights to keep them warm while she was asleep :) So much fun!

Just in case you love stories as much as we do, The Best Nest is the perfect one to read before, during or after playing with the nest-building bin :)

Stay tuned for more tweet bird fun!