Halloween Sensory Bin

This Halloween sensory bin has been a huge success in our house. It’s super easy to quickly pull together a simple sensory activity like this. Try it and see what your kids think.

Safety note: This sensory bin contains small parts and battery operated lights. Close supervision is required.

Sensory bins are a great way for kids to work on fine motor skills. Scooping, digging, and pouring is tons of fun.

How to Set Up a Halloween Sensory Bin

Look around your house and see what materials you already have. Once you’ve gathered some simple supplies, you can interchange the materials and create a bunch of different sensory bins.

Supplies We Used

Black pebbles
Pumpkin painted rocks
Spider erasers
Pumpkin erasers
Pipe cleaner spider
Battery operated tea lights
Spoon or shovel
Storage container (I used a shoe box sized bin here.)

The size of your storage container will determine how much of a filler material you’ll want. I had a small bag of pebbles, so I used a small shoe box sized bin. Sometimes we use containers the size of a baking pan. And sometimes we use a large under the bed storage bin.

If you don’t have black pebbles, you could use black rice (or dyed rice) or dyed chick peas (like we did for our space themed sensory bin).

Add at least one Halloween themed thing to the filler material for your child to manipulate. I added a few pumpkin rocks that we had painted for a pumpkin rocks alphabet activity.

I also included spider erasers and pumpkin erasers. Erasers make great manipulatives for lots of learning activities. They encourage fine motor work plus you can practice counting. How many pumpkins can you find? Can you help the baby spiders find their mom?

Use a spoon, a shovel, or even some tongs to encourage scooping and digging.

To give the sensory bin even more of a Halloween feel, I added battery powered tea lights. Be sure to supervise the use of the lights. The batteries can be dangerous if swallowed. I encouraged my son to cover the lights with rocks. I asked him to keep the lights in the bin.

A pipe cleaner spider was my final addition to the Halloween sensory bin. I made several of these spiders to use as Halloween decorations last year for a sponsored post. I even added a string of LED lights to make their eyes light up.

What Halloween themed items will you combine to create a sensory bin?

More Halloween Sensory Activities for Kids

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