A Rainy Day: Water Beads Sensory Bin Treasure Hunt & Alphabet Search

This will be a short and sweet post, mostly pictures, about Liam’s pre-therapy activities this morning. Every Thursday I am hoping to feature a couple easy to do ideas that can be pulled together quickly but still be entertaining. This is the latest DIY Thursday activity. I think both of these ideas can be great for a variety of ages with a little tweaking. My wonderful friend Crystal supplied me with the materials for this one so that it would be new and exciting for Liam since we have been doing water beads quite a bit this week.

First we did a water beads sensory bin treasure hunt together or a hide and seek. 14×2=28 objects (matching pairs) hidden in the beads. It was nice that he hadn’t seen these little objects before so it really was like a treasure hunt!

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Originally the activity was just to use the kid friendly chopsticks and pull things out of the beads to put in the tray but I wanted to make it last a little longer and be more hands on for him. I figured he would enjoy this activity so I would draw it out a little longer. I added the green bowl and had him use his hands to find the hidden objects since it is so cool to feel the water beads on your hands. I made sure there were two of each item for sorting later as a control. He enjoyed discovering the new items and talked about them and with them and showed them to me as he found them. Once they were all in the green bowl, I explained there were two of each item for each segment of the ice-cube tray. He had a little trouble getting started so I suggested he find all the elephants first and so on….. He did pretty well with the chopsticks and did not need any prompting to continue using them. He definitely had to take his time or the objects would go flying. Once he was finished, he asked if he could show his rescue bot transformer to the animals. He continued to do a bit of pretend play with the transformer and some of the little animals. However, it didn’t last to long when I said that I would sit with him but not play right that moment.

After that, we did an alphabet hunt together. This can be done in so many ways for so many ages and abilities. Liam like doing math activities over letter activities so I have to be creative with this one! I kept it pretty simple, quick and easy so we could go through it with ease. I had these laminated letters already from Easter last year that I never used (glad to use them now!) but you could easily use index cards or flash cards or even go on an alphabet object search depending on what your child is capable of doing. Bonus, the backs of the letters were made for matching so we ended up with a side activity when we finished with the letter matching. I had put out his magnet alphabet letters prior to starting the activity just to help speed things up for us. He went all around the house collecting his alphabet (gross motor!), excitedly shouting out the letters as he found them. Hooray, he knows them all out of order! We ended in his playroom where we matched them to the magnets. He had a tough time getting started and was acting pretty silly and picking the wrong letters but he fell into a rhythm and happily completed it. Once done, we sang the alphabet song and he jumped around the letters for a few minutes calling them up. We gathered up the eggs and turned them over and had a very pretty matching game to do. The patterns were different but similar in color scheme but he went through it quickly just the same and even finished up when I left the room to let his therapist in the door!

I am so glad he was open to doing these activities with me this morning. I am always happy to do anything with him that he is willing to do especially when I can be a little crafty.Both activities took about an hour all together but there are so many extension activities you could do with them. The possibilities are endless.  I think I may have worn out his patience for his therapist a little bit, but better her than me! 😉

Linking up to the Teaching Mama rainy day activities for preschoolers