Easy Airplane Sensory Bin for Kids

Learn how to make an Airplane Sensory Bin for your kids to play with. Toddlers and preschoolers will have lots of fun engaging in pretend play, sensory exploration and more with this simple idea.

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Table of Contents

• More Transportation Play Ideas
• ​What You’ll Need
• Watch the Video
• Instructions
• Different Ways to Play
• You May Also Like

More Transportation Activities for Kids

If you’re looking for more play ideas that fit a transportation theme, then you’re going to love these easy play ideas. Young children will have so much fun learning about different transport vehicles with these activities.

1. Construction Sensory Bin
2. Transport Lacing Cards (Free Printable)
3. Car Coloring Pages (Free Printables)
4. Paper Airplane Launcher
5. Toilet Roll Airplane Craft

For more ideas, take a look at all of our Transportation Activities for Kids.

Materials Needed

1. Large tub
2. Blue rainbow rice
3. Cotton balls
4. Toy airplanes
5. Sensory bin tools

Watch the Video

How to Make an Airplane Sensory Bin

1. Fill your tub or sensory table with blue rainbow rice.

I used my taste-safe rainbow rice recipe to make a tub of just blue rice. You can also use the recipe to turn pasta, chickpeas or many other fillers into a different color.

If you don’t want to use rice you can also use blue kinetic sand, water beads or even use blue food coloring to make blue salt instead.

2. Add in the cotton balls.

I used cotton balls for the fluffy clouds, because I knew that they would be perfect to do some counting practice with. However, if you want to try and make your clouds out of something different, you can also try shaving cream, or white sensory dough instead.

3. Add the airplanes.

We made these popsicle stick airplanes ourselves. But you can use toy airplanes if you already have some on hand.

Now all you have to do is enjoy playing.

Different Ways to Play

1. Scoop and pour.

Play around with different sensory bin tools. Using tongs and spoons to fill up cups and bowls as well as pouring the rice from one container to another is a great way for kids to develop fine motor skills.

You don’t need to have any fancy sensory bin tools. A set of plastic cups, bowls and spoons are all you need for any of your sensory bin ideas.

2. Counting clouds.

Use the cotton balls to practice counting to 10 or 20. If you use cotton balls of different sizes then you can also sort the balls by size, which is another math skill that kids need to learn.

3. Imaginative play.

One thing that I would do differently, would be to include a runway for our airplane to take off and land on. It’s easy to make your own using black paper and correction tape, just like I did with these DIY Road Blocks.

Are you going to make this Airplane Sensory Bin for your kids? Don’t forget to pin the idea for later.