Sound Soup

While stimulating all the five senses during sensory activities for kids is important, most of the attention goes to touch and sight. Most children thrive very much on feeling and enjoying the texture of any given sensory materials. Bet it gooey play { snow goop anyone?} or running their hands through scented rice or cornmeal. { All messy play ideas here} However the sense of sound hasn’t really got any attention here in our household. Today’s sensory play idea is yet again a Christmas sensory activity. Best of all - this is created and implemented by by 6 year old. Ooh and it involves jingle bells. Brace yourself for more jingle bell activities { Stop by our jingle cups post}

• Jingle Bells
• Large Snowflake Cutout Jingle Bells
• Tongs
• Peppermint Extract
• Metal Container
• Water

Sensory Activities for Kids : Jingle Soup — Process

She started with a shiny bowl of water. Then insisted on adding our peppermint salt from our writing tray. But I strongly suggest adding peppermint extract and food coloring to color and scent the water. The salt content messed up our bells.. Then she slowly added all the small bells we had purchased. These bells are really small about the size of a garbanzo bean. They were perfect for our kind of play. While adding the bells, she watched how some bells sank immediately and some took time to sink. A few for floating for a longer time. See how sensory activities for kids can be used to think, explore, hypothesize and investigate. { Have you seen our Playful Learning : Science and Math Activities for kids book?} We ended up adding all the 3 packs of jingle bells we had.

I can’t stress how gorgeous this entire soup creation experience was. All the colors of the bells mixed along with the peppermint aroma was just screaming “Christmas sensory activity”

Then came the best part. Once all the bells were added she started having tremendous amount of fun “mixing the bell soup” Why was it oh-so-fun? Well because it made insane amount of sound. Generally mixing is fun for kids. But add sound to that, then its something they don’t want to stop doing.

Later, she added slightly larger bells because the focus had shifted to “playing restaurant” { Christmas sensory play and role play}. Leave it to the kids to come up with the best sensory activity ideas. She declared that the green, white and gold bells were different colored peppers and she was making a hot and spicy pepper soup.

She really enjoyed using the tongs during play time and started creating some unique dishes for the customer { me of course!} Golden soup is served. Then sensory activity morphed into so much more and she started sorting them into several bowls.

These are golden cupcakes by the way. They are very good for your health! Will you try this simple fun “Jingle Soup” during your next playtime with your kids? Just remember to use a metal container while creating the soup to have the best time. Some of our favorite “soup” themed sensory activities Googly Eyes Soup from Fun At Home With Kids Fall Leaves soup from Next Comes L

Thanks for reading

More Sensory activities for kids can be found here.