Christmas Sensory Tub

Well Christmas has been and gone but I have had this sitting in my draft posts for weeks so I thought I might as well publish it!

Our run up to Christmas was busy, with the building work for the extension going full steam ahead & daddy away for a little while to see family in South America, our 'Advent Activity Calender' was becoming a bit neglected (the chocolate ones, not so much). As a list-making obsessive type it was getting me down that I wasn't able to do some of the nice activities I had planned.

Then Aunty Anna arrived a few days before Christmas to spend the holidays with us and brought with her a whirlwind of festive creative energy! She arrived bearing gifts of homemade christmas spice and peppermint playdoughs (make christmas playdough -check), brought a stable made from a cardboard box (make stable for nativity scene -check), made 3D snowmen Christmas tree decorations with Poppet (make christmas tree decorations -check), made a complete set of nativity figures from toilet roll tubes with Poppet, made spiced  biscuits, wrapped presents and generally just became our little house Elf.

Uncle Pete, who also spent Christmas with us, also deserves a mention for his impressive parsnip peeling. 

This was our first Christmas in our own family home and it was exciting to start to cement the family traditions that will make Christmas special for us in the years to come. Drawing from the lovely Christmas memories we have each brought with us from our respective families and inventing some new ones of our own!

So, back to the post -this was (as the title suggests) a tub filled with interesting Christmassy things for the girls to explore with all their senses. Except taste, preferably, but Little didn't get that memo. We used a drawer from our Trofast storage system as a tub.

I filled it with cinnamon scented red rice, gold pine cones, dried orange slices, cinnamon quills, baubles (top removed) ribbons, a bell, green pompoms, lengths of beads, a plastic pot filled with peppermint oil-soaked cotton wool and measuring scoops.

They loved exploring everything; I did not love hoovering up red rice all the time. Or fishing it out of Little's mouth. I really need to reclaim my Tuff-Spot as that would have contained the rice better; it was used in the building works and is all grubby now.

Little liked carefully dropping the lengths of beads into the pot. Very serious. Poppet liked filling up various containers with the rice using the scoops. She filled the baubles up with rice and then shook them to make a sound. And I often found the nativity figures in the tub too.

Poppet: 2yrs 11 mos

Little: 1yr 2mos