SENSORY TABLE IDEAS

Using Sensory Experiences in the Classroom

• Add bubble wrap, old cars and a little water to your sensory table. The children drive their cars over the bubble wrap to make popping noise.
• Make the water table a garden. Fill with topsoil and add flowers or seeds. Add gardening tools such as trowels, cups, and pails. Plastic/silk flowers can also be used for a "ready-made" garden.
• Add tearless baby shampoo-bubbles are made with wire whisks or a hand cranked mixer.
• During very hot weather put ice cubes in the water table. Let the children experience cold and melting. Make ice cubes and freeze fun things inside such as small dinosaurs, jelly worms, counting pieces, plastic bugs/insects. Ice balls can be made from freezing water balloons overnight. Tear off and discard balloons before adding ice balls to table.
• Add a turkey baster, empty squirt bottles, and funnels. Discuss terms like: empty, full, more and less.
• Make "oooey gooey stuff" for the water table. Recipe: Liquid starch and white glue (usually equal parts, mix and it becomes "blubbery".
• Add water with wiggly fishing worms. Children will giggle while grasping the slimy worms!
• Have children pan for "gold". Place a layer of sand at the bottom of the sensory table and enough water to cover the sand by three inches. Add tin pie plates and pyrite or small pebbles to the sand. Have the children pan for the “gold”.
• Add potting soil and live earthworms.
• Use the table for washing baby dolls and dishes.
• Use cornstarch and water to make "goop".
• Add sea animals in blue water.
• Add fake gems in the sand and dig for treasure.
• Add bird seed with different sizes of sifters and sieves.
• Add tree limb to represent a log and plastic frogs.
• Spray paint dried lima beans gold and use in sand for searching for gold.
• Create a pond using plastic fish, frogs, lizards and lily pads cut from craft foam.
• Make an assortment of funnels by cutting plastic bottles in half. Cover the cut edge with masking tape.
• When studying measuring, use plastic bottles of varying sizes. Draw several lines on each bottle with different colors of permanent marker. Have the children fill the bottles to the line and then compare which has more.

PROPS FOR SENSORY TABLE