Hammering Frozen Water Beads is so much fun. Kids of all ages will love cooling down and burning off excess energy with this sensory activity during the hot summer months.
If you want to make your Summer themed lessons a breeze, then check out the Summer Activity Pack. It’s filled with math and literacy centers, fine motor activities and arts and crafts templates. All of which are aligned with preschool learning standards. Check it out today.
Disclosure: Water beads are a choking hazard. Adult supervision is required for all activities at all times. Some of the links provided in this blog are affiliate links. I will be paid a commission if you use this link to make a purchase.
Summer Themed Sensory Play Ideas to try
There are so many fun ways to engage in sensory play this summer, and they don’t all center around the water table. Younger children, like toddlers and preschoolers will love playing with these fun ideas.
- Sun Sensory Bin
- Ocean Small World and Sensory Bin
- Ice Cream Sensory Bag
- Mini Ice Aquariums
- Moana Sensory Bin
For more ideas, take a look at these 25 Summer Sensory Activities.
Materials Needed
- Water beads
- A large container
- A smaller container that fits in your freezer
- Hammers
- A freezer
How to Make a Hammering Frozen Water Beads Activity
1. Place your water beads into a plastic container and freeze overnight.
2. The next day, remove your water beads, break them apart and place them into a larger plastic container.
I put the contents of 2 sensory bottles into a small square tub. If you can, I would highly recommend using a different size, like a larger container for freezing your water beads.
The reason for this is that my beads froze together, making a large brick that was difficult to pull apart. I then spent a long time trying to break the brick up into smaller pieces. If I had used a larger tub to begin with, I’m sure the water beads would still have frozen together, but into a thinner rectangle, which would have been a lot easier to break up.
3. Add in your toy hammer, and any other sensory bin tools you want to play with.
If you like, you can also add in some cardboard tubes like in this water bead tunnels sensory bin. This is a great idea if you want to do a bit of STEM play at the same time.
Different Ways to Play
Hammer the water beads
Take a hammer and smash (with as much force as you like) the frozen beads into pieces.
While I was disappointed that the water marbles froze into a cube, because it wasn’t what I was aiming for with this activity. It proved to be fantastic for my kids, who loved smashing the big brick of water beads into pieces. In fact, they had more fun demolishing the large brick than they did aiming for each of the individual water beads.
I think that the next time that I do this activity, the easiest way will be to place the water beads into an ice cube tray instead. Then there will be a whole lot of ice cubes for the kids to have fun with.
Make a water bead tower
Once all of the water beads were hammered, my little girl gathered up all of the pieces and tried to make a tower with them. She enjoys pushing them around on the floor and rolling the small pieces in between her fingers.
Sweeping and cleaning
Once all of the playing was done, my little girl decided to sweep up all of the pieces for me. As you can imagine I was thrilled with this idea.
Using a dustpan and brush, she practiced sweeping and collecting all of the water bead pieces into a single pile.
What You’re Learning
Sensory
Like with all sensory experiences, this activity provides a lot of sensory input. The water beads feel wonderfully cold and a little bit rough when they’re frozen. This is refreshing on a particularly hot day, so I would recommend saving this activity for a real scorcher.
Hammers also make a loud banging sound when they hit the pavement. Explore the different sounds they make as you (carefully) hit different materials, such as the pavement, the large sensory tub and the water beads.
Fine Motor Skills
Fine motor skills refer to the small muscles in the hand and fingers. Developing these skills are important in being able to write when the kids go to school, as well as being able to complete tasks independently. (For example, dressing and feeding themselves).
Picking up the beads, and and hitting them with a hammer are all going to help young kids develop:
- Palmar grasp
- Hand-eye coordination
- Hand strength
Gross Motor Skills
Hammering is a wonderful way to help children build upper body strength. It’s also a great way to help young children let off some excess energy.
Life Skills
Using a dustpan and brush is a life skill that children will need to learn. We take this for granted as an adult because for us, cleaning is a never ending chore. However children can still use these everyday objects to play and learn.
STEM
There are a few different STEM activities that you can explore with this water bead play idea.
Science – talk to your children about cold vs warm, and how this can change the state of a substance. We usually do this with warm water, but water beads can still teach our children that freezing water makes it solid and cold.
Math – Count the water beads as you hammer them. This is the perfect way to get your kids to practice counting to 10 or 20, all while they play.
Get over 80+ pages of Summer themed play based learning activities and craft templates. Perfect for preschool and kindergarten.
Are you going to try this Hammering Frozen Water Beads Activity with your kids?
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