Transportation Sensory Bin

My little man had his second birthday at the end of February, and with his passion being trucks and big machines and buses and generally anything with wheels and motors, I decided to make transportation the focus of our school time for the past couple of weeks.  I'll post more of our activities, but here is the sensory bin I put together for our unit.  

I started with one of our normal bins.  I put in a container of old garbanzo beans I had for "rocks," and then I mixed up some cloud dough using some corn flour.  I've seen lots of cloud dough recipes, but the basic thing seems to be about an 8 to 1 ration of flour-y something to oil.  The corn flour stuff we buy here is much finer than the cornmeal we usually get in the States, so I thought it might actually work well for cloud dough to make it sandy-looking.  I used 4 cups of it with 1 cup of baby oil and then ended up adding a bit more oil until it was the right consistency.  I added a few of little man's trucks, and we had a fun bin for starting out play.  The little neighbor boy even appeared again when we were playing with it and was excited to jump in.

We had a good time with the bin, but I wanted to do a bigger bin for this unit, as I was hoping to have it out for the kids to play with at the birthday party as well, and our current bins are a bit small for more than two kids to play in at once.  So, I went and bought a plastic bin/tub at a local shop and got even more looks than usual as I carried it home while pushing our double stroller!  I'm going to be honest; I got a little giddy putting this one together, as I really thought the kids would enjoy it...which they did!

I put the beans and sand cloud dough in, and then I put in a bag of green rice I had from a previous bin.  This was our "grass."  Then I added our "mud" by putting in some Chocolate Playdough.  This stuff was amazing, by the way!  You have to make it, but do NOT doing it when you're hungry because it smells SO good.  It's a great texture, too, and made a perfect addition to the bin.  I actually made a double batch and saved 2/3 of it for playing outside the bin.  Here is our finished bin.