Top 11 Sensory Bin Ideas

These sensory bins are fun and easy for mom to assemble, fun and beneficial for kids, and a great way to engage kids in wholesome play! The best thing about these sensory bin ideas is that they are so doable for mom – plenty of ways to keep it simple or add in something extra!

Something else to appreciate about these sensory bin ideas is how wonderfully customizable they are. The options are seemingly endless, and I have some tips on what tends to work well together!

Another thing I’d like to mention – sensory bins should not cost an arm and a leg. That’s part of why I prefer to assemble my own for the kids instead of buying kits. Another reason making them is preferable to purchasing pre-assembled kits is that it is easier to customize the sensory bins to what we are currently learning about or my kids’ current interests!

To me, that’s what “mommy magic” is all about – a little touch of something special that makes an ordinary day feel magical! Usually it’s something that my kids feel seen, heard, understood, appreciated, etc.

Why Sensory Bins are Great

A little bit of “why” goes a long way. Why should parents care about sensory play?

The short-ish answer is that kids need a variety of experiences to develop properly. They need to experience everything from the changes in the seasons to different textures of food. They need to splash in warm water and cool water and they need exposure to sand and dirt too!

Every single sensory experience develops your child’s brain. It changes the way they interact with their world. Generally, more sensory exposure and more experiences equates to optimal development.

As kids grow, this can translate into increased adaptability to new circumstances and experiences and a greater sense of curiosity.

Nature is a great place for kids to gain a lot of sensory experience, and I wholeheartedly recommend nature play! But I also want my kids to be enjoying sensory experiences when I can’t be outside supervising the littlest, when it’s too hot to get outside on summer afternoons, and when I don’t have time to drive them to the nearby state park.

Plus, sensory bins are a great way to incorporate hands-on learning activities! As you’ll see below, we’ve used them to practice math skills, practice reading/spelling words, open-ended play, and more!

Keeping Sensory Bin Fillers Simple

I wholeheartedly recommend looking around your house and starting with what you have around the house already. I did need to purchase (or thrift, or seek out hand-me-downs) more things with my first child, and by the time we got around to the third kiddo, I pretty much had everything I needed around the house to make a wide variety of bins!

There is only one thing I absolutely recommend you purchase getting started: if you don’t already have a set, a simple and complete set of alphabet and number cookie cutters will go a long way and help make a lot of bins!

This is the exact set we have, and at the time of publishing this post it was less than $20. If you are reading this near a holiday or your child’s birthday, you could even give them as a gift with a batch of homemade playdough!

As far as the container for your bin, I encourage you to be flexible and creative! For years, I reused the same disposable 9 x13 foil pan as our sensory bin. Glass baking dishes were great for my kids that I trusted to stay sitting and not take the dish anywhere!

If you want a bin with a lid, I’ve purchased some over the years at Costco, the Container Store, and these ones on Amazon are Prime eligible!

Dried Beans Sensory Bin

Seriously easy to put this one together! Dried beans, measuring spoons and mixing cups, maybe something from the play kitchen, and ta-dah! Sensory bin magic!

My daughter asked me, “Wait, are these real beans?” She loved the sound the dried beans made against the plastic bin and against each other and spent a long time picking up and dropping a few beans at a time just to enjoy the sound!

Alphabet and Playdough Sensory Bin

We make homemade playdough regularly around here (because cooking is math AND science, and because it’s fun!) and the kids love seeing the playdough they made in these official looking plastic containers! Once the play dough is no longer good for playing with, I hand wash them and dry for repeated use!

Paired with the letters of the alphabet, playdough (homemade or store bought!) is a great medium for interacting with the alphabet in a multi-sensory way.

This ABC sensory bin is one of my favorites for kids who are learning letters, beginning phonics, and basic spelling! I suggest letting your child play freely for 10-15 mins and then join them to practice letter sounds and letter names.

Some children prefer cutting letters out completely while others prefer making an impression of the letter. Don’t feel like they need to do it one way or the other.. the point is to explore and interact with the alphabet and their sounds in a sensory way!

Shredded Paper Sensory Bin Filler

Wow! I was blown away how long my kids wanted to play with shredded paper! And to think of all the years I wasted simply taking this stuff to the recycle or compost bin when I could have been offering it to my kids first. Bummer!

They found it mesmerizing to pick up and sprinkle down over and over again. I did too! I mixed things up a little by letting my preschooler have a pair of lightweight kitchen tongs while she played with this and I gave her an extra baking dish too. She had a great time scooping up shredded paper with the tongs and moving it from one dish to the other.

Numbers and Counting Sensory Bin

Homemade playdough for the win again! These colorful plastic counters were a big hit for smushing into the playdough, but coins would work well too! I recommend washing the coins in warm soapy water and then drying them first.

If you want to turn this bin into a learning activity, after at least 10 minutes of free play with the pieces, you can encourage your child to stick as many counters as they want into a blob of playdough. Together, count how many counters are stuck in.

Find the number cookie cutters that make up that number and yay – you practiced counting with your child today! Early math skills are really that simple to begin teaching.

Cutting out or creating impressions of the numbers is a great idea and then stacking or laying out the counters with the corresponding number is a fabulous way to solidify the connection between a numeral and its value. More early math education with one sensory bin! Mom win.

Rainbow Rice as a Filler

Dried rice is a very affordable sensory bin filler. Sometimes we use regular dried white rice and other times we use a variety of colors of dyed rice! It’s easy to make and the change in colors is a fun way to change things up using a little mommy magic.

When using rice, I like to provide scoops, cups, measuring spoons, etc. Anything they can scoop and pour and fill with rice is always very popular!

Spelling Sensory Bin

We already had this Toob of knights (scored from a thrift store!), and I added some of our homemade playdough. I placed the cookie cutters “KNIGHTS” in the bin and set it in front of my second grader who loves medieval history and is working on spelling “kn” words. He played with it for almost an hour!

What do you have at home? Animals? Trucks? Hot wheels? Playdough + toys + letters that spell a word = awesome sensory bin!

Mommy Magic Idea: to increase the sensory experience, I kneaded mint essential oil into the blue playdough.. it was so fun when he opened the jar and realized the playdough was scented!

BONUS ACTIVITY for established readers: Put the letters of two words, “KNIGHT” and “SWORD” in the bin and tell your child there are two words that use all of the letters! Can you figure out what words they are? If you only have one set of alphabet cutters, you might have to get creative thinking of words that don’t use the same letter twice!

“Name” Sensory Bin

For this bin, I gave one of my kids the pieces to cut out his name. As it happens, his siblings had other sensory bins with the letters I needed to spell “name,” so I had him use our magnetic alphabet letters and it worked out okay!

I didn’t want to put my kids’ names all over the internet, but you get the idea – this sensory bin idea should include the letters for your child to spell their name, some playdough, and a rolling pin was a nice touch! I have it on my wish list to add a mini rolling pin to our supplies, but we used the full-size kitchen one this time.

Muffin Math Sensory Bin

Purchase alert, to replicate this bin exactly, you’d need this muffin math game. It’s an amazing game and I used it with all of my kids starting as toddlers and keep using it (in creative ways) even into algebra! And I love using the pieces for other activities like this muffin sensory bin! No muffins?

That’s okay, any set of math counters that you might have around the house could create a similar bin!

For a young child, the muffins, playdough, and play muffin tray will be plenty inspiring! That said, just to prove that sensory play is not only for little kids, I also set up a version of this bin for my 5th grader.

I put muffins, homemade lavender playdough (recipe coming soon!) and the number coins from the muffin game. I would have my son use the coins to make a two or three digit number and then he would create a demonstration (in whichever way he chose, using the sensory bin items) of multiples of that number. It was a great way to take a mental concept and turn it into a physical learning experience!

Fall Sensory Bin

Rolled oats make a surprisingly soothing sensory bin filler. They smell nice and earthy and are the perfect backdrop to a fall-themed bin. You can go for a nature walk and add fall nature items to the bin or you can include little pieces of fall decor you have around the house!

DIY “Gravel Pit”

Kids who are crazy about trucks are going to love this construction themed bin! Keep in mind that you do need a larger bin to make this one maximum fun.

A larger bin gives your child enough room to fit the tractors, extend their diggers, and ensures you can put enough material in the bin for the construction trucks to dig down!

The gravel pit bin has been a favorite for getting some outdoorish sensory experience when we’re stuck inside for whatever reason.

Now you’ve got some great ideas for putting together a sensory bin for your child – which one are you going to try first?! Do you have other sensory bin fillers that your child really enjoys?

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