What are Water beads?
Waterbeads are usually sold in sachet and are can be either packed in a single colors or can be multi-color.
As you may have guessed, the beads need to be submerge in water so that it could expand and turn into jelly-like balls. It usually takes 4 – 6 hours for the water beads to grow in size.
I prepare the beads the night before so it’s ready as soon as my daughter likes to play in the morning.
Here is what the water beads look like before and after soaking it.
What are the benefits of playing with Water Beads?
Water beads are great for sensory play. Through sensory play, kids are able to:
- Practice and improve their fine motor skills through touching and holding onto the water beads.
- Improve learning through experience.
- Improve their language development assuming that you engage the kids into a conversation and help them describe what they are seeing and feeling.
- Get acquainted with textures.
- Have social interaction as they play with you or other kids.
- Learn different concepts depending on how you present the water beads.
How can kids play with Water beads?
- Free Play/Exploration – Let your child touch and play with the water beads as he/she pleases.
- Transferring and Pouring – Add some cups, spoons into the sensory bin and let the child practice scooping and pouring into the different containers.
- Color Sorting – Using a spoon, let you child transfer waterbeads into another container based on their color
- Add theme to your sensory bin – An example could be under the sea theme. Take the chance to introduce the names of the animals as your child plays. We used Ocean and Arctic Toobs as well as miniature animals we got from Shopee.
I added ice to introduce concept of cold to complete our Artic-themed sensory tray.
Here is the sea with shoreline sensory tray. I added some kinetic sand to complete the look. However, I must warn you this is a messy combination. (Haha!)
Note: Please do not leave your little kids unsupervised as they might put the water beads on their mouth.
We had fun playing with the water beads. Will you try this at home with your child too?
Till my next blogpost!
