Macaroni Sensory Bin

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Macaroni Sensory Bin

03/17/2020

Macaroni sensory bin

Schools and daycare are closed and I’m sure you’re looking for ways to keep your child entertained. We love our sensory bin and change out the contents every couple days to keep things fun and interesting. This is also great for moms with a new baby and an older child – keeping your busy older child preoccupied while you feed baby.

I like the macaroni because it’s big enough that it’s not a pain to clean up but also small enough that my daughters uses their fine motor skills to pick up the macaroni. We wanted to dye the macaroni to add some colour and make it more visible – but this isn’t necessary – you can use regular pasta. To colour the macaroni we placed it into a pan.

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We poured a mixture of food colouring and rubbing alcohol over the macaroni

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We used rubbing alcohol because the macaroni won’t absorb it like water. If we were to use water and dye the macaroni would absorb that water as well as the dye making the macaroni wet and soft. By using rubbing alcohol the macaroni only picked up the dye, leaving the macaroni dry and perfect for a sensory bin.

And then we let it sit for 2 hours (the longer you let it sit, the more dye it will absorb – so for a lighter colour you won’t let it sit for as long (about an hour) and for a deeper colour you would let it sit for 4+ hours.

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Once the macaroni was the colour we wanted it, we drained out the rubbing alcohol and laid the macaroni out to dry

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Once the macaroni was dry (a couple hours) we added it to the bin

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We had enough macaroni so there was about 4 inches of macaroni along the bottom of the bin

We then added some different toys (construction themed) that my daughters can play with in the macaroni, along with a little shovel

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My daughters love this sensory bin. They like to fill the dump truck up with the macaroni and drive it over to unload it.

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