Grace, a kindergarten autism teacher, shows how to make a watermelon sensory bin with rice dyed red, black beans, and a plastic container. She adds two task extensions: color sorting and placing figures on a grass card to build language and counting skills.
Hey y'all, my name is Grace here with The Autism Helper, and I am a kindergarten self-contained autism teacher. Today we are going to be making a watermelon sensory bin. This is perfect for summer and it's super simple, and honestly, you might have a lot of these ingredients already in your home. All you're going to need for this watermelon sensory bin is a bag of white rice, a bag of black beans, some red food coloring, and then optional but super fun is to add in some watermelon essential oils. So once you have all your materials, what you're going to do is you're going to pour your rice all into a bag, put about 12 red drops of food coloring in there, mix it all up, and then once the white rice is completely covered in the food coloring, you're going to go ahead, dump it out, lay it on some paper towels, and let it dry. I like to let mine dry overnight, but a couple hours should do the trick as well. Um, and then once you are finished with your rice, you're going to go ahead and pour it into some kind of plastic container and then sprinkle in some black beads. So I actually already finished my base of my sensory bin. It looks like this, reminds me of a watermelon, and I just have all of my red rice in there and then my black beans sprinkled throughout. So just a sensory bin alone with the rice and the beans is great for kiddos to explore. It works on regulation, it helps with language building. You can also add in some various activities into the sensory bin, and I have a couple that I'm going to share with you all that are from The Autism Helper. They are all from their Summer Task Box collection. Okay, so I'm turning you guys around so you can see inside the sensory bin a little bit better, but something I like to do is add different cups, and this one works on scooping and pouring for students, and also adding in those task boxes I was talking about. So this first one that I have is a color sorting task box activity. This is the Summer Items Color Sort. You could make this airless by just doing one color at a time and putting those items inside the sensory bin. This is great for working on one color at a time and then also item recognition. You can bury the items under the rice and have the students dig for them and find them and talk about the different items that they are putting on the card as they complete the activity. If you want to take this one step further and make this a little bit more difficult for your kiddo, you could also add in two colors, so they have to find the items and then sort the items by color. This next task box activity is another airless one. This is Summer Scenes, so there's a bunch of different options. You can just pull one out at a time. This card says, "Put the people on the grass," so you can have your students find the different people and then put them on the grass. You can talk about how many people there are, what they are doing, and what they're wearing. Just various different ways to incorporate more language throughout this activity. There are many more activities within our Summer Task Box collection, but these are just a few ideas to get you started. Alrighty, y'all, that is it for today's video. Leave a comment down below letting us know if you try out this sensory recipe and what your kiddos think. Have a great rest of your day.
