- Little Regent Nursery
- Crafts
How to Make Colour Sensory Bags
Some of the best early years activities cost almost nothing and take five minutes to prepare. Colour sensory bags are a firm favourite in our baby and toddler rooms: a sealed pouch of clear gel with colour and small objects inside, which children can squash, press and drag their fingers across without a single drop escaping.
They suit a very wide age range. A four-month-old lying on their tummy will bat at one taped to the floor. A toddler will push the colours apart and watch them run back together. A three-year-old will hunt for hidden letters or count the stars inside.
Here is how to make them.
All the fascination of messy play and none of the mess, which is why these tend to reappear on a rainy day.
What you need
A strong zip-seal freezer bag, clear hair gel or baby oil, a few drops of food colouring or a squeeze of poster paint, and strong packing tape. Optional extras: sequins, plastic letters, pompoms, buttons, glitter, small foam shapes or a handful of dried pasta.
How to make one
Half fill the bag with gel, no more, or it will not squash properly. Add colour a drop at a time, then add your small objects. Press out as much air as you can, seal it, and tape right along the zip and around all four edges. Double bagging, with the seals at opposite ends, is well worth the extra minute.
Setting it up
Tape the bag flat to a low table, to a window at child height, or to the floor for babies on their tummies. Fixing it down means little hands can use both palms to press rather than picking it up, and it keeps the bag well away from mouths.
The colour-mixing version
Make a bag with two separate blobs of colour, blue at one end, yellow at the other, and let your child push them together to discover green. Red and yellow, or blue and red, work equally well. It is a first chemistry lesson delivered entirely through fingertips.
Ways to extend it
Hide plastic letters and ask your child to find the one their name starts with. Drop in ten pompoms and count them as they move. Add glitter for a slow, calming, snow-globe effect that is genuinely useful in a fraught moment before nap time.
Safety first, always
These are for supervised play only. Check the seals and the tape before every use, throw the bag away at the first sign of a leak, and never leave a child alone with one. Keep loose small objects out of reach while you are assembling it.
What your child is learning
Cause and effect, colour mixing, early vocabulary for texture and movement, hand strength, and the focused attention that comes from an activity you can repeat endlessly without ever getting quite the same result twice.
Sensory play like this runs through every day at Little Regent Nursery, alongside water and sand play, messy and heuristic play and our Little Einsteins STEM activities. It is one of the clearest examples of the EYFS principle our whole curriculum is built on: young children learn through play. To see a sensory session in action, contact us to book a visit.
Post A Comment