Rainbows and Butterflies Sensory Bin

It’s a been a bit of a crazy week in our household so it was great to get out our rainbows and butterflies sensory bin for a calmer activity. This is a great sensory bin coming into Spring as it can easily be incorporated into a Spring theme.

Rainbows and Butterflies Sensory Bin

You can check out all of our sensory bins here. For the rainbows and butterflies sensory bin I used colored oats. Oats are a really cheap sensory bin filler and quite easy to color. As with most sensory bin materials they’ll keep for quite a long time if you store them properly (I use a large sealed container). Enjoy the separate colors the first time they play as you know they’ll all get mixed up quickly!

What you need for the Rainbows and Butterflies Sensory bin

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Large Container – I used a flexible oval container that I picked up at the hardware store for this one. I really like this as it didn’t have the sharp edges that some of the plastic bins have. The only downside is that it doesn’t have a lid.
Safari Ltd Butterfly Toobs
2 bags of plain oats
White vinegar
Food coloring (any colors – we used red, blue and green)
Zip Lock Bags
Baking Paper
Scoops

How to make a Rainbows and Butterflies Sensory Bin

How to color oats

Coloring the oats is a very similar process to coloring pasta or rice.

Place the oats into 3 ziplock bags (one for each color)
Add a teaspoon of vinegar and 3-4 drops of food coloring
Close the bags and mix up to spread out the colors. You’ll notice that the oats we used weren’t totally covered and I think this is a nice effect. You run the risk of them becoming clumpy if you put too much vinegar or food coloring in so start with a bit and add more as you go.
Spread the oats out to dry onto some baking paper and leave to dry

Setting up the sensory bin

Add each color of oats – I kept mine separate to start with though they will end up mixed eventually.
Add the butterflies
Put in the scoops
Let them play!

How they played with the Rainbows and Butterflies Sensory Bin

This was a relatively simple sensory bin, but my girls played with this for a long time. It’s a great reminder that sometimes simple is best. Once you’ve colored the oats, you could set this sensory bin up in a few minutes.

We started out our play by reading some of our favorite butterfly books including The Very Hungry Caterpillar of course. We chatted about how caterpillars turn into butterflies and then we started to play.

My girls started by scooping up each butterfly and discussing the colors. They then placed the butterflies on the matching colored oats.

After this they hid all of the butterflies, using the scoops to hide them. This of course led to the ‘hunting’ of the butterflies where they had to find them all again.