Awesome indoor water table sensory play is at your fingertips! When the weather gets too cold for all the great outdoor sensory play you have been doing, don’t pack your water table up for the season just yet! There is plenty of sensory play that can be had with your water table if you bring it inside!
Indoor Water Table Sensory Play Ideas
I know you are thinking all about the mess and the reason why the water table was meant for the great outdoors! I am here to show you, you might just be wrong! I specifically chose these awesome indoor water table ideas, as well as a couple of our own, to show you that others have braved the mess and brought their water table inside. You will find small worlds, science experiments, and learning ideas with your newly repurposed indoor water table!
Benefits of Sensory Play
I highly encourage you to read all about Tactile Sensory Play with our new resource guide! Lots of tips and ideas for all kinds of sensory play that you can easily recreate in your repurposed water table! Read all about the greatest form of hands-on play for young children, tactile sensory play.
Handling the Mess! What Should I do?
Sometimes you need to embrace a little mess, but I have some thoughts on how to handle the mess. Ultimately a little mess is bound to happen as accidents do happen. We still have them here. However accidents are much different that purposefully making a mess when it is not encouraged (such as body painting outdoors or in the bath tub!)
Model appropriate or desired play behavior with sensory bin
Set expectations and follow through for not throwing sensory bin fillers and remove if necessary
Teach respect for a sensory bin as you would a toy. You would not expect your child to throw a puzzle all around the room would you?
Place a sheet under the sensory bin for easy clean up and to protect floors if necessary
Teach clean up skills as part of the sensory bin play!
Practice fine motor skills by picking up individual beans that fall on the floor
Choose a filler appropriate to age the child can help clean up (such as pompoms for a young child)
Supervise your children and be a part of the process
Repurposed Indoor Water Tables Sensory Play Ideas To Try!
Construction Play With Mixed Materials
Beach Sensory Play and Small World | Fantastic Fun and Learning
Pretend Play Construction With Coffee Grounds/ Creekside Learning
Fizzing Koolaid Experiment/ Artsy Momma
Exploring A Frozen Water Table/ Teaching 2 and 3 Year Olds
Indoor Sand Table Surprise: Construction Mining/ For The Love of Learning
Winter Rice Sensory Box/ Pink And Green Mama
Turtle Facts Sensory Play/ Creekside Learning
Small World Beach Play/ The Boy And Me
Water Table Repurposed/ A Cookie before Dinner
Dried Bean Sensory Table/ Craftulate
Playing and Learning with a Bead Sensory Bin/ Artsy Momma
Hands-On Geography Animals and Habitats/ Creekside Learning
There are some pretty cool sensory play ideas here! You can do just about anything you want with a repurposed water table! I love how the sections create unique play areas! I love to use what I have a around the house to come up with new ideas which makes this a super frugal idea as well. Not cold enough where you are? Bring it in for rainy day play or when the weather gets too hot. No matter what season you are in or what your climate is like, an indoor water table will definitely be a hit!
ALL ABOUT SENSORY PLAY FOR KIDS
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Amanda @artsy_momma
Thanks so much for including our Science and Beads posts 🙂 Awesome list!
littlebins
Great idea, so glad I found it!
Julie @ Creekside Learning
Thank you so much for including several of our activities. We love our water table. Currently, it is in the playroom filled with sand and plastic animals. 🙂