Sensory Table

For one glorious week in our city, we enjoyed gorgeous summer temperatures, which prompted me to order my little water-lover the water table I'd had my eye on. As I figured, it was a huge hit! When the weather cooled down we were both left missing our afternoon water play, but we quickly found that the table was great for other sensory play as well! We've been able to practice many transfering and scooping Montessori practical life activities as well with this wonderful table. It has been such a great investment!

This particular table came with a water wheel, though it was a bit too tall for Tyler to use just yet. Luckily we found plenty of other fun things to experiment with instead! We used several different sized containers, sponges, washcloths and scoops. I plan to purchase a little watering can for him soon which could be used here, though an empty yogurt cup with holes poked in the bottom worked great! Two small sailboats came with the table as well, though we had a hard time getting the sails to stay on.

Transfering water from one container to another

Giving himself a shower, haha!

Before we bought the table, I had given Tyler birdseed in his sensory bin to go along with our spring activities. He enjoyed this quite a bit, but he loved it even more when inside the table! There's so much more room to play! I've actually kept this out the last few days for him to use whenever he pleases as he's gotten surprisingly better about keeping the birdseed in the table.

Before the table, a sick and tired Ty enjoys filling and dumping

Scooping

Transfering dry material from one container to another by pouring

Pouring into a water wheel I bought seperately

Before the birdseed, I used assorted puff balls and cotton balls in the table. This wasn't as big of a hit after a while, as Tyler apreciates when things make a bit of a noise, but we did find ways to have fun with it. Tyler enjoyed scooping the puffballs as well as filing many different kinds of containers and dumping them out. We used the colored puffballs to sort by color into a small ibe cube tray as well as talked about size.

I love that we were able to seperate/sort the white cottonballs from the colored puffballs

After all this fun and with the weather warming-up again, I'm left seriously considering buying a smaller table to keep for indoor sensory play. It's been such a huge activity and he is learning something new everyday! If you have a great sensory table suggestion that's geared towards dry materials, I'd love to hear it.