Taste Safe Sensory Play Kit

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Last week, while standing in the courtyard browsing our copy of 150+ Screen-Free Activities for Kids {as you do}, one of my mama friends mentioned wanting to start some simple sensory play with her little lady.  Lucky for us, her first birthday was coming up, which allowed us the perfect opportunity to put together a taste safe sensory play kit for her!

If you haven’t already picked up a copy of the book, you must.  While I very much stick to easy peasy play recipes {or variations of ones we love}, my friend Asia {the author and blogger behind Fun at Home with Kids} is fearless when it comes to concocting new and unique recipes that have not been done before, and her book is chock full of them.

With 150+ Screen-Free Activities for Kids as our inspiration / guide, Gracen and I sat down down together and made a list of the homemade sensory play materials we wanted to include in our kit.  Asia’s book had so many awesome ideas to choose from, but we focused on ones labelled ‘taste safe’, which made the decision making process much easier!  I also really appreciated that each recipe included a likely ’shelf life’, as we knew we wanted our birthday girl to be able to enjoy her sensory play materials again and again.

Here’s what we included…

The taste safe moon sand found on page 76 of 150+ Screen-Free Activities for Kids…

The taste safe cloud dough found on page 69 of 150+ Screen-Free Activities for Kids…  {You can see our not-at-all-taste-safe version here, but I much prefer Asia’s recipe and have made it the same way many, many times.}

Rainbow pasta made exactly as we usually make our vibrant dyed rice, but Asia has an even more baby-friendly method on page 167 of her book…

And rainbow chickpeas inspired by Dyan of And Next Comes L.  We also made these using our vibrant dyed rice method, but if you didn’t need them to be taste-safe, her method would be perfect.

Here they are all together.  Aren’t they pretty?!  I love the contrast of the two natural bins beside the two bright rainbow-coloured bins, and I also like that it will give our friends the option to use the no-dye materials now while their little one is teething and still putting everything in her mouth, and save the coloured ones for a little bit later on if they so choose.

Once all of our materials were ready, we put them into these awesome shallow containers we found at our local City Star.  Then we simply stacked them up and added some handwritten labels before tying them together with some pretty twine and adding a gift tag to the top.

Here’s hoping Miss G’s little friend gets lots of fun and play out of her new sensory materials!

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