When it comes to Valentine's Day sensory activities, the color red and hearts are a must. Then add a dash of something pink and it's absolutely perfect.
Well, this Valentine's Day sensory bin with dyed chickpeas is all of that. It has hearts and lots of red and pink hues.
But more importantly, this sensory bin is super fun to play with! Your kids will love scooping up the chickpeas and putting them inside the heart shapes.
A version of this post originally appeared on the CBC Parents website.
Valentine's Day Sensory Bin: What You'll Need
To create this Valentine's sensory bin at home, you'll need:
- 3 cups of dried chickpeas - We'll be using 1 cup per color: red, pink, and white.
- Liquid watercolors in red and metallic pearl white - I bought ours at Michael's. By the way, you can also use acrylic paints instead of liquid watercolors, if you prefer.
- Large zipper seal plastic bag and paper towel - To color the chickpeas
- Heart cookie cutters - We have this set of Wilton Cookie Cutters that have a little bit of everything, including these heart shaped ones.
- Red measuring spoons (or similar)
- Large dish or sensory bin container
To color the chickpeas, put one cup of dried chickpeas in a zipper seal plastic bag. Add a generous squirt (a little goes a long way!) of liquid watercolors to the bag. Seal it and shake! Shake until the color is well distributed. You may need to add another squirt of liquid watercolors to evenly coat the chickpeas. For more details on how to dye chickpeas, you can read my original instructions here.
Once covered, lay the chickpeas on a piece of paper towel or parchment paper to make sure the chickpeas are dry. They dry pretty quickly (usually a minute or two).
For this bin, I used red, metallic pearl white, and pink (just a squirt of red and a squirt of the white together does the trick!) dyed chickpeas so repeat until you have all three colors.
Once everything is dry, add it to a large dish or container. Then add some heart shaped cookie cutters and some scooping utensils (or similar) and it's ready to go! It's so pretty, isn't it?
This sensory bin is easy to put together, even if you've never made rainbow dyed chickpeas before. Dyed chickpeas only take a few minutes to dry - I promise! - and are way easier to clean up than dyed rice. There's a reason why dyed chickpeas are my personal favorite sensory bin filler.
Playing with the Valentine's Sensory Bin with Dyed Chickpeas
Your kids can use the measuring spoons to scoop and pour chickpeas. Since we're just using measuring spoons, they can only scoop up a couple of chickpeas at a time.
Personally, my boys love to scoop and pour the chickpeas all over. Like I mean, all over the place, as you'll see. So to help contain the mess, I usually lay a shower curtain or sheet underneath the sensory bin. Then when they're done playing, I can just pick up the shower curtain and dump the chickpeas into the bin. That's my number one sensory play tip, by the way.
Your kids might also use the cookie cutters to kind of stamp into the chickpeas. Or they might even take out the cookie cutters and try to fill them with chickpeas outside of the container.
However your kids decide to play, I hope you enjoy this simple and colorful Valentine's Day sensory bin with dyed chickpeas. It's a lot of fun and it looks so pretty!
