Our household has officially become kid craft obsessed! We’ve jumped on the water bead train and now are crazy about making sensory bottles! They are so simple to make and really give you so many options. I think I am just as about obsessed with making them as Emmy is playing with them!
We started with making your usual sensory bottle. We added food coloring, boat loads of glitter, sequins and other sparkly things that any kid would love to watch float around. We even made one with some of our water beads!
To make these sensory bottles, we followed these steps:
- Fill an empty water bottle 1/2 way with warm water (it needs to be warm or your glue will have trouble mixing in). We like the Voss water bottles because you can easily stand them on their head to watch the items float!
- Fill the remaining space in the water bottle with clear glue. If you plan to add a lot of little nick-knacks, you may want to leave an inch or two in the bottle for them. Remember, the more glue you add, the more your glitter will suspend.
- Add food coloring (I ALWAYS do this early on in the process in case I add too much coloring. I’ve made this mistake before and had to dilute the coloring a bit. It’s easier to do this when there is not glitter and other items in the bottle.
- Add all the glitter and glitzy things that you’d like!
- Mix it up! Add more of whatever you think you need (glue, glitter, color) before the final step!
- SUPER GLUE THE LID! Out of all the steps, I’d say this is the most important!
The one day, while looking at her blue sensory bottle, Emmy said something about the ocean and I thought “how fun would it be if there were little fish in there for her to find?!”. That was the start of our new sensory bottle obsession that we’ve dubbed “I Spy Sensory Bottles”.
I found the dinosaurs, stars, fish and ice cream cones in the button section of Joann’s! These I Spy Bottles really do keep my toddler super entertained and it’s a fun activity for us to do together.
A few things to keep in mind when making an I Spy Sensory Bottle: the buttons (or whatever spy items you add) will most likely be much heavier than glitter and sequins so you will really need to increase the amount of glue that you have. Again, test everything out before you super glue the lid shut.
We hope you enjoy these as much as we do!
