Fall Sensory Grab Bag

For last year’s fall theme, I made a sensory grab bag. I put in two plastic apples, one pomegranate, one larger pumpkin, two little pumpkins, a couple of gourds, corn, and to add some natural materials, I used some acorns, pinecones and leaves. I stapled the top of the bag shut, but left an opening big enough for a hand. I wanted the kids to reach inside, feel the object and guess what it was before showing the rest of the class. For the most part, it didn’t work out that way. Most of the kids didn’t want to reach their hand in the bag at first. Then when they decided it was okay, they were rushing to pull all the objects out. After all the objects were out, we talked about fall and how things change color. We talked about the color and size differences between the apples and pumpkins. Most of the kids hadn’t seen a pomegranate so we talked about that, but I should’ve brought one in for them to taste. We did a taste test for three different colored apples. The kids learned that some apples are sweet and some are sour. They enjoyed looking at the new objects and tasting apples. Below, I have a picture of some of the things I put in the bag. I found all these things at the Dollar Tree. You can also find these fruits at Walmart and a lot of other department stores.

Sound and Object Matching Activity

I did this listening and matching game with last year’s group of kids. I put several different objects in small juice bottles and covered them up with contact paper.

The objects were pompoms, paper clips, sand, popcorn, rice, macaroni, coins, beads, rocks etc. For the first part of the game, each kid took one bottle, shook it and tried to guess the sound. If he or she couldn’t figure it out, other children would start guessing. Since this was a new game, I’d give hints like, “what do we eat when we’re at the movies?” Another hint was, “what do we find on the beach or play in outside?” Once we knew what all the objects were, we compared sounds. The pompoms are a quiet sound and the rocks were loud. The beads and popcorn made similar sounds. The coins, paper clips and rocks made sounds that didn’t sound like any of the others.

Then for the second part of the game, I brought out the cards with the objects taped to them. This way, they could match the cards with the sounds. Each child picked a card. When it was his or her turn to share what was on their card, the other children shook the bottles until they identified the sound that match with their card. It started as a listening activity and then they were able to use sight and in most cases touch, to match everything up.

Guessing Smells Activity

I did a fun activity with the kids where they had to guess what smell was in each bucket. I bought these small buckets that close from the dollar store. The night before we did the activity, I soaked cotton balls in whatever I wanted them to smell like. It was a little hard to find at least twelve different smells that they could actually guess, but I found enough things. To make it easier and less messy, I had muffin tins that I’d put the cotton balls and the liquids or powders in so they could absorb the smell. With the powders, I added a tiny bit of water to the cotton balls so the powders would stick. After a few minutes of soaking, I put the cotton balls in their buckets and closed them up.







For the smells, I used vanilla extract, obviously for vanilla. I used coco powder for chocolate. I wanted a strawberry scent, but I didn’t have strawberries to squeeze the juice out of so I used Strawberries and Cream Vo5 shampoo. This worked well and that scent was the favorite for most of the kids. I used cinnamon. I had a spice that has a barbecue scent so I tried that. That one was a little harder for the kids to guess, but they got it. I wanted other fruit smells, but didn’t have any fresh fruit so I used several sprays. One was orange scented and the other smelled liked freshly baked cookies. They are grooming sprays that we use for our pets so they are safe, but these kids are old enough to know not to put these things in their mouths. I used apple scented body wash, bubblegum hand soap, maple syrup, mango iced tea mix and coffee. If there were more smells, I can’t remember them.

The kids really liked this activity. They had fun guessing and smelling the buckets over and over. Another thing you could add to this is to have cards with pictures that match with the smells in the buckets. They’d be using sight and smell which would be good for a five senses theme. I’d like to try this activity again with different smells so if anyone has any good suggestions, that’d be great.