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Off-Road Bins

Using plastic bins and flour as a base, create sensory bins for your child. As they explore the different textures and feelings of flour and other materials, your child will become more comfortable with using their fine motor skills.

Off-Road Bins

Materials

Shallow plastic bins or totes
Toy trucks, cars, planes, or trains
A variety of household goods to make your “off-road terrain”
- Flour, rice, sand, and smooth pebbles make great bases for your bins
- Consider adding “obstacles” or areas of interest with shaving cream, play foam, or glitter

Instructions

Gather your plastic bins and base material, such as flour or smooth pebbles. Fill each container a little less than ¼ of the way full.
Have your child select the toys they want to play with. The best toys for this activity are made of plastic or wood and feature wheels that spin freely.
Once you’re done with the prep work, it’s time for some off-roading adventures! Place the container in front of your child and let them play. As they run the wheels through the different textures, ask your child to tell you what the material feels like.

Off-Road Bins

Why is this a great thing to do?

Promotes fine motor skills.

Introduces your child to sensations.

Practices speech.

Talk About

“What does the flour feel like?”

“Do you hear the sound of the rice as it moves?”

“Are your hands sticky? Dry? Dirty?”

“Which bin do you like the most?”

Tips & Extensions

Use your best judgment for what types of textures to introduce to your child. Avoid mixing too many materials at once or mixing competing textures. Flour with a glitter mountain makes sense; flour with a shaving cream river is a recipe for a “muddy” disaster.

Take pictures of your child as they play. Great moments to capture include:

The look on your child’s face when they realize you’re letting them get dirty for fun
Your child’s inner curiosity as they discover what different textures feel like on their hands and as they push their toys through them
The moment when your child sets the toys aside to play with their hands instead

If you’re using flour or similar material in your off-road bin, you can easily transition from this sensory activity into a quick art project. Provide a sheet of black construction paper and allow your child to roll their flour-covered toy wheels over the paper. Once the paper is covered with tire tracks to their satisfaction, seal over them with clear plastic tape!

Make STEM Connections

Help your child develop a more in-depth understanding that different properties are suited to different purposes.

Try an absorbency experiment.

See which materials absorb water and which repel it with this simple yet fun experiment.

Sort your toys by properties.

Wood, plastic, metal, silicone, or cloth, what are your child’s toys made of? Have your child sort their toys by color, size, soft, or hard. There are more unusual properties such as weight, the sound it makes, opacity, flexibility, and if it sinks or floats.

Conduct a culinary experiment.

Prepare some foods with your child that are a variety of textures and hardnesses. For example, you might choose a dessert theme and discover that pudding is very soft, jello is a little soft, cupcakes are a bit harder, cookies are harder still, and jellybeans are crunchy on the outside but soft on the inside. You may want to select a single object such as a metal spoon to test each item against. You can also try things to draw attention to the properties of your food, such as occasionally serving monochromatic (or rainbow) meals!

Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) Correlation

2-PS1-1

Plan and conduct an investigation to describe and classify different kinds of materials by their observable properties.

2-PS1-2

Analyze data obtained from testing different materials to determine which materials have the properties that are best suited for an intended purpose.