Christmas Sensory Box

Over December I put together some different sensory boxes for the children to explore as well as having a session on different Christmas smells, we had some frankinsense essential oil, fresh pine, oranges, cloves, cinnamon, ginger, peppermint and vanilla. What smells remind you of Christmas?

We made some cloud dough and added lots of silver glitter and some tinsel, the older ones loved this, for some reason the younger ones (under 2s) were a bit more suspicious of it but once they had tentatively poked and prodded it they had fun.

Cloud dough recipe is 2 cups of plain flour mixed with 1/2 a cup of baby oil and mix well, it should be like damp sand, when you squeeze it together it will mould into a ball but easily crumble and not sticky to touch.

Had fun with loads of shaving foam and glitter, for a very pretty snowy time.

Then decided to add some clear water beads for a different texture, the children really loved this.

I also dyed some rice in lovely Christmas green and red colours and when dried added some Christmas sequins, the children enjoyed playing and making patterns in the rice. To get the best, deepest colour, we used a dye paste rather than the liquid food colouring. I added a little paste to about 30ml of water and then mixed it into 2 cups of rice, leave it to soak up the colour and then tip out an old cardboard box and leave until thoroughly dried.

Then a selection of different coloured tinsels, they had great fun pretending to be a Christmas tree.