Water beads can provide a unique calming and soothing sensory experience for children while encouraging sensory and tactile exploration. They're bouncy, colourful, squishy and so much more. With water beads, the fun can be endless!
Children will love exploring the slippery and bouncy nature of these balls and it also makes for a great science experiment as children can watch the balls grow in the water right before their eyes.
We love water beads because they're a great sensory tool to use to help improve hand-eye coordination and fine motor skills and there are so many fun ways to play with these colourful delights!
Here are just some of a few ways we love to use our water beads in play:
- Use the beads to teach little ones about colours. Get them to seperate the colours into single colour groupings. Make it a challenge and see who can do it the fastest.
- Use them to introduce numbers and basic math concepts of counting, more/less, number groupings.
- Hide small objects and figurines into the balls and get them to dig and rescue them all.
- Place the beads in a see through bowl, near a window with sunlight and look at the beautiful shadows and colours that shine through from the beads.
- Place some paper and paint in a box or a deep tray and use the beads to roll across the paper for a different painting medium.
- Use old cups and jars of different sizes and get your child to scoop the beads into the jars. Ask them questions like which has more? Which is lighter? etc.
If you're ready to start incorporating water beads into your little ones play time, our jumbo water beads pack is a great starter kit. It comes with 1kg of fully grown water beads, a scoop and an extra bag of dried water beads, so you and your child can grow these yourself and watch as the beads magically expand to over 1000x their original size!