Need a quick and simple sensory activity for your toddler? Don’t want a big mess and something that’s easy to clean up? Simple materials are a plus?
Have you ever tried soap foam? It’s a wonderful sensory material that’s cheap, quickly made and just really fun to play with!
Maybe you remember E’s Colorful Soap Foam Sensory Bin or N’s Baby Play with Soap Foam. E was 2, N was only 7 months old for their respective activities and they both had so much fun with it!
For our most recent activity using it, I added a few of our blocks to a bin with a little bit of soap foam. It took 5 minutes to set up and N had great fun with Toddler Play with Foamy Blocks.
(N was 1 year and 1 month old.)
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Materials for Toddler Play with Foamy Blocks
- Baby soap. {For older toddlers and up, you can use dish soap for even more suds.}
- Hand mixer.
- Shoe box sized storage bin.
- Blocks. {We have these Infantino Squeeze and Stack blocks. Decent wooden blocks should work, too.}
I simply put a few squirts of baby soap and a little bit of water into the smaller storage bin I like for baby and young toddler activities. With a hand mixer, I quickly made enough suds to cover the bottom of the storage bin with just about half an inch of foam. Baby soap doesn’t foam up nearly as much as dish soap, but it doesn’t take much for sensory toddler fun!
I picked five blocks in different colors to put into the sensory bin and as usual when I set up an activity for him {or E for that matter 😉 }, N came right over.
He dipped his hand into the foam first.
At first, he wasn’t sure what he thought, but got the hang of exploring it pretty quickly.
When he did the baby activity 6 months ago, he never tasted the soap foam, but he did now. I didn’t have a problem with a little taste and he didn’t try again after this. I don’t think it tasted good.
He felt the foam on his arms
before he turned his attention to the blocks.
After he’d played with the blocks for while
and started losing interest, I stacked the blocks up for him. He LOVED it!
The first thing he did was knock over the blocks, of course.
This new perspective on the blocks inspired him to more exploration.
He tried to put two blocks together
and literally played with hands and feet.
He even tried to stack two blocks – and succeeded! I was surprised, since he hadn’t tried this before – and E was never really all that interested in building towers at all.
Have you tried sensory activities with soap foam? What’s your favorite quick and simple sensory activity? Leave a comment below!
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If you’re looking for other simple sensory bins for toddlers, try these:
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Cute! Sharing on my page! 🙂
Thank you for sharing!