sensory tub [oatmeal]

I'm so excited that Lincoln is finally getting to the age where we can do planned learning activities during the day.  The teacher in me finds this UBBER exciting!  My friend Julie has blogged here about doing an activity with her son Ori called a "Sensory Tub."  I think she found the idea at "I Can Teach My Child," which has tons of great ideas of learning activities to do with your kiddos.

 I have been meaning to do a sensory tub with Lincoln for quite awhile now since he's seemed ready for something like that. So today we finally did it.  "I Can Teach My Child" defines a sensory tub as, "simply a tool for children to learn about the world around them using their sense of touch. It allows children to explore different textures."  I decided to start with oatmeal and since we've been trying to work on learning animal sounds I decided to put Lincoln's animals in the tub. 

 "What is this?"

He wasn't quite sure what to do with it at first

Checking out the oatmeal...

"This looks like something I should eat...nom, nom, nom."

 I worked with him a little on the animals and their sounds but he was more interested in filling things up with the oatmeal and spreading it all over the floor! 

Notice how he's dumping the oatmeal out onto the floor here? :)

An Oatmeal mess!  It wasn't hard to clean up though just a quick sweep and voila! a clean floor!

Poor rooster didn't get to enjoy the oatmeal for very long.

The tub kept Lincoln busy for almost an hour and then he was getting bored with it and started wanting to dump it all out and carry the tub around so we put it away and listened to "Old McDonald" a few times.  Lincoln had fun dancing to the music!  I can't wait to try some other kinds of sensory tubs!