Little Hands: Sensory Balls

February 19, 2015 by Andrea

Ok, so the post title does make me laugh….or kinda sound gross…..but anyway I think these turned out pretty nicely. At our Little Hands Love Art program (and all other Little Hands programs hopefully), there will be a sensory pool (literally a blow up kiddie pool) with items for touching. I’m assuming our littlest artists won’t necessarily be as into creating art as so much into experiencing it. So in addition to foam brushes, regular brushes and rollers, I decided to make sensory balls out of art supplies.

Yes, I have concerns about tossing a ball covered in buttons to infants and saying go at it, but I will be warning parents and suggesting the button ball (and probably the sequin ball) would be best for parents to roll on the baby or not the best item for those babies who love putting things in their mouth.

The button and pom pom ball were super easy to make…it probably took 20 minutes per ball (and I even stopped to scope out some summer reading t shirts). I used hot glue to stick the items on to a styrofoam ball. There were no issues with melting styrofoam, although people warned about that with high heat glue guns….apparently $8 glue guns are not exactly “high heat”. Caveat with the button ball is to be careful of hot glue oozing out the string holes, yowzers.This sequin ball proved to be the trickiest. I though I could just slather on some good ol’Aleene’s Tacky Glue and roll sequins on….but they all got lumpy and half on/off so I moved to individually placing them….yes it took long but i think a infant will really enjoy looking at the shiny reflections. I thought about covering the whole thing in some watered down Elmer’s glue but if a baby is going to put it in their mouth I’d rather them not suck on a layer of glue. Again, I will strongly encourage parents engage (and control) the use of this ball in the sensory pool.

And hopefully the balls will demonstrate to parents how easy it is to take some extra “junk” and make a learning toy for baby!

Another sensory ball, this was from poms attached to string….for knitting a cuddly scarf….not as easy as I’d hope….I didn’t want to leave excess string because that would invite more tugging off the string. Pretty to look at and soft to touch though!