Brightly coloured loose parts + chickpeas make a fun and beautiful sensory tray to explore colours!
A fun way to explore & learn about colours in a hands on way is to create a rainbow colours sensory tray for kids!
This was easy to set up using some of our rainbow loose parts and gem blocks. Chickpeas are a favourite sensory play base and the uncoloured chickpeas go well with colourful loose parts.
There is lots to scoop, pour, sort and stack in this tray ... lots of play possibilities!
*Play ideas for ages 3+ as contains small parts. Play was supervised at all times. Always supervise sensory play.
For this rainbow colours sensory tray for kids we used:
Chickpeas
Gemstones from Bunnings
Lucite cubes
Papoose rainbow bitcoins
Busy Bee Tray - Gus and Mabel with half tray insert
Scoops & tongs
Coloured Grapat nest bowls
Book - Usborne The Big Book of Colours
You could substitute the above with any type of tray, bowls from the kitchen, rainbow coloured loose parts (think buttons, pom poms etc.) and a book about colours.
Get creative and think outside the box using what you already have. You don't need to have these exact items to create an amazing and colourful play tray!
Possible learning opportunities through play:
Colour sorting and matching
Colour words & recognising colours
Working on fine motor skills
Developing hand eye coordination
Vocabulary- colours, meanings of colours words etc.
Capacity - filling and emptying the bowls
Counting - How many pink gems? I have 7 blue gems etc.
+ many more possibilities ...
How we used this play set up at home:
Miss 4 sorted and colour matched gems and lucite cubes hidden into the Grapat bowls as treasures. This helped her work on her fine motor skills picking up and placing the gemstones.
She stacked some of the rainbow bitcoins.
We had a discussion about some of the meanings of the colours as we read this page of the book (vocabulary building).
We looked through the rest of the book.
I talked about primary and secondary colours with Miss 7.
Miss 7 took a photograph of the blue bird in the book and sent it to her nan along with a typed message (writing for a purpose).
Thank you for reading this blog post!
This colour themed sensory tray was both fun and able to provide opportunities for learning through play.
Do you have any coloured resources that you could use to set up a rainbow themed sensory tray? Any rainbow coloured loose parts + a sensory base would work! I hope you found some inspiration today.
Until next time, have fun learning in a playful way!
For more play and learning ideas visit the homepage
now & subscribe to the email list below.
Save this idea for later - Pin me now!
