Water Table Repurposed

For Malone’s second birthday he was gifted a Little Tikes water table by his aunt and uncle. It hasn’t really gotten used as much as I would have liked because while we have yard space, we really don’t have a good spot in our yard keep it set out. We have  a front and side yard but not a back yard. I’m not going to lie- it spent most of the summer living on our porch collecting dust.

The water table is a great play space and with Malone out of full time daycare and home more, I wanted to find a new use for it. So we cleaned it out and filled it with rice and other goodies!

Bam- water table repurposed!

I filled the water table with white rice, pom poms, a few different things to scoop with, small dinosaurs, and some of his construction vehicles.

And he took over from there.

He does a great job at keeping MOST of the rice in the water table. He’s discovered that marbles work great for putting down the whirly blue tube (in the middle of the table).  Most of the play has revolved around construction and road work. However, the other morning I did hear some dinosaur excavation happening. I love that this is so open ended and the mess is contained. Since I took these photos, we also added a bag of dried black beans. Some of his friends have similar sensory stations- you can use just about any dried bean, rice, or noodle. Feed corn works well too.

There are lots of sensory bin ideas on the web. Give it a google if you’re curious. A lot of bloggers have brilliant ideas about different themes to put together. For us, we’ll probably keep it pretty simple with rice and pom poms.

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This post originally appeared on A Cookie Before Dinner in November of 2012. I have updated the original and am republishing in celebration of Fall!