Sparkly Winter Sensory Bin with Snowflake Letters

It's no secret that we love the ABCs in our house. Both of my boys learned their letters really early, but I still like to do alphabet activities pretty regularly to reinforce their knowledge. With winter already in full force, I decided it would be fun to make a winter-themed sensory bin. For this bin, I whipped up some sparkly soap foam. To make the foam, I mixed dish soap with some vanilla brown sugar body wash, a splash of water, and a copious amount of silver glitter using an electric hand mixer. The scented body wash is optional, but the faint smell of vanilla was an added sensory bonus! I usually avoid glitter as it gets everywhere, but I thought it was a nice way to reflect the way freshly fallen snow sparkles. I added some dollar store foam snowflakes into the bin. I also found some really cool mirror snowflakes at the dollar store, so I used those to make my alphabet snowflakes. I just wrote the letters of the alphabet on the snowflakes using a black permanent marker. You can just write letters on the foam snowflakes if you cannot find similar mirror snowflakes. K, who is two, was really interested in the letter snowflakes, carefully picking them out from the soap foam. Then K would happily identify the letters that he found. "It's B!!" Four-year-old J spent some time searching for letters, but then decided to play with the foam snowflakes instead. The fun thing about craft foam is that it sticks to things when wet. So J decorated the side of the bin with the foam snowflakes, making it feel even more like winter. Despite finding glitter for days (okay, weeks) after setting up this bin, I love how simple and pretty it was. I only wish that I had thought to put the soap foam in the freezer for a bit so that it would have felt cold like real snow too. That would have been really fun too!