Red, White, and Blue Mini Sensory Bag
Sensory bags are a lot of fun. They give lots of sensory input without any mess, you can use any small items you’d like, even if their size isn’t age-appropriate yet, and you can easily take them wherever you go.
This time, we kept it pretty basic and “minified” the concept when we made a Red, White, and Blue Mini Sensory Bag.
(N was 1 year and 10 months old.
E was 5 years and 6 months old.)
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Materials for Red, White, and Blue Mini Sensory Bag
- One Ziploc snack bag.
- Duct tape.
- Clear hair gel. {If you wanted to, you could use pink or blue hair gel, or color your clear hair gel yourself with food coloring or liquid watercolors.}
- Tablespoon.
- Mini erasers in red, white, and blue (mine are from Target) or other red, white, and blue items. IÂ went for simplicity here, but glitter would definitely be an awesome addition!
I actually bought those snack bags by accident and didn’t think I was going to need them, but I ended up really liking them for a few things. One of them being actual snacks for my kids 😉 They seem to be doing quite a good job of cutting down the number of Cheerios (N’s snack of choice) dropped each snack time.
And then I realized that they would work great as mini sensory bags, too! {Do you do this? I often look at everyday items and suddenly inspiration hits for something kid-related I can use it for – even if I’ve used the item in question many times before without thinking twice about it.}
Make the mini sensory bag and play with it!
I used a tablespoon to get the hair gel into the bag. It ended up being about 2 tablespoons’ worth.
Once the hair gel was in, I added four blue, four red, and four white star-shaped mini erasers.
I sealed the bag with some fancy red holographic duct tape. My kids aren’t extremely hard on sensory bags, but if you’re concerned about leakage, you can use wider duct tape and/or use another Ziploc bag on top of the first one.
{Note that the bags I used have the opening on the short side. I’ve linked a different type above that has the opening on a long side to make it easier to get items in.}
N couldn’t wait to get his hands on the bag.
He had fun squishing the stars around, and we talked about the colors of the stars.
When he was about to get up from the table, he tried to sneak it away under his t-shirt 😉
But not only almost 2-year-old N enjoyed this red, white, and blue mini sensory bag, E had fun squishing it, too.
She extended the activity by sorting the stars by color. You could encourage this for older kids by marking areas of the bag in red, white, and blue respectively with a permanent marker and having your kids move the stars to the matching areas.
When she was done color sorting, she started fiddling with the bag until she decided she’d made a red, white, and blue “butterfly” 🙂
N also spent some time with the bag on a recent long flight, so it’s a good item to throw into a bag when you travel. As a bonus, it’s small and doesn’t weigh much.
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Here are a few more sensory bag ideas:
“Flower Meadow” Sensory Bag (we used leftovers from a sensory bin for this one!)
Play Dough Sensory Bag for Babies
Alphabet Sensory Bag by Mom Inspired Life
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