5 Reasons Every Homeschool Should Use Sensory Bins
Sensory bins have been a huge thing in many classrooms for the last few years, but especially for homeschoolers. However, not everyone uses them if they don’t believe their child has sensory issues. As a homeschooling parent you should definitely be using these in your homeschool regardless of sensory needs of your children. These reasons below are just the beginning of why you should begin using sensory bins for your homeschool classroom.
Why You Should Use Sensory Bins in Your Homeschool
There are so many benefits of sensory play, but these are a few that particularly apply to homeschooling:
Encourages classification understanding.
Learning about classification applies in multiple parts of education. Sensory bins are excellent for children to understand how to sort, separate, and recognize items. They are a great way to have children sort colors, textures, like items, items that don’t belong, and even shapes. Since classification matters in math and science so much, it is a great tool not just for younger children but also grade school level classroom work.
Helps kids use all of their senses.
The senses are part of exploration, knowledge, and learning. Sensory bins obviously help your kids use all the senses, but this is also a super fun way to encourage them to recognize what senses they are using. Encouraging them to not just experience the sensory bins, but to note what senses they use to separate items and classify them is a great way to help them to really think outside the box. Kids don’t often think about how they are using not just their eyes to see food, but their sense of smell and taste to determine what something is. The same thing goes with their sense of touch and smell when they are working in a sensory bin.
Encourages calming in active children.
Kids that struggle with ADD, ADHD, or simply have a hard time focusing can really benefit from learning through a sensory bin. It gives them something hands on to touch and play with while they learn. You can even easily give your children sensory bins to work with while you are going over lessons, reading or asking them questions about what you have been covering. Utilizing a sensory bin throughout the classroom is great for kids who tend to struggle with staying still and concentrating. You can easily help them focus on the lesson by providing a sensory bin that is applicable.
Helps to incorporate all subjects in one location.
Sensory bins are amazing tools to bring all of your curriculum into one simple place. You can add math, science, history, and even language assignments all inside one bin for your kids to learn more about one subject. Something like this alphabet sensory bin can help little ones learn in a multisensory way that they’ll remember.
These are especially nice for unit studies on specific subjects or ideas. Choose items for your sensory bins that fit into each subject if possible. You can use counting, sorting, specific historical items for a subject, and even special specimens for science to create a great sensory bin that encompasses all of your class work in one location.
You can take a look at the simple sensory bin we used in our ocean-themed study before our field trip to the aquarium. It was a great way to tie all of those learning concepts together!
Helps kids to follow directions.
If your kids struggle with following directions, sensory bins are an amazing tool. By giving them specific things to look for, sort and separate, you can easily create a manner of following directions that they will enjoy. This is really important as they move into other subjects where following directions impacts how they come up with an end result or answer. I love giving my kids a list of items to sort out or directions on how to use the sensory bin for our classwork. This keeps them occupied, learning and working on that direction following problem they often have in the early years.
Using sensory bins throughout your homeschool classroom will be a great way to help get your kids the hands-on education they need. It gives them an easy outlet to use their hands while learning, and allows them the sensory opportunity that many children need to truly understand concepts.
Do you use sensory bins in your homeschool?
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