Happy Monday! Here we are again, entering another new school week, and for many parents, we're trying our very best to come up with educational activities for our children to supplement their e-learning experiences while we are on 'stay at home' order. With Easter just a couple of weeks away, I wanted to bring a springtime and Easter element into our constructive play and activity time at home. As much as we as parents might cringe at the idea of sensory play with items like Play Doh, clay, Floof, magic snow, and water beads, they are awesome tools for teaching.

Add the tiny beads to water and watch them grow! So much fun!

We have a pretty good stash of water beads, which are so much fun! They are crazy tiny colored beads, and they expand 10x(+) their original size once in water. It's really cool for the kids to see the transformation take place with the water beads. You can do this activity alone as a science lesson with older kids.

With younger kids, they're not usually as patient as older kiddos are, and it does take time for the beads to expand once added to water. I would suggest letting the beads sit in a container full of water overnight to have them ready for playtime the next day.

Picking the beads up as they're expanding is half the fun!

We started out 'growing' our water beads in medium size bowls. As the beads expanded, they needed more room, so we transferred them to larger Tupperware containers. This gave the kids more room to 'play' with the beads.

For added sensory play, you can add various items into the container of water beads, like tiny plastic toys (dinosaurs, safari or farm animals), buttons, small tub toys, rubber ducks, and so on. My kids love to 'scoop,' so we added an Easter element of play with plastic Easter eggs. I had a ton of them stored from last Easter, and they kids loved filling the eggs with the water beads, and emptying them back out.

We added color sorting into the mix, too. I asked the kids to fill the blue eggs with blue beads, yellow eggs with yellow beads, and so on. It kept them occupied for quite a while, and also helped my youngest (almost 4 years) work on her sorting skills.

Add in small measuring spoons for scooping fun, or small wooden spoons for stirring. Sort by color into empty ice cube trays, or sort however else you and your kiddos would like to do it.

Water beads are fun for kids of all ages- my nine-year-old loves to play with them.

A word of warning:

Water beads go everywhere if not contained! I always put dish towels down on the table to catch any water or beads that  spill out of the play container. Large containers work well to hold and store the beads during and after play time. Store in an air-tight container and keep them wet to keep the size... otherwise, they will shrink back down to their original size.

Use what you have at home to make playtime with water beads fun and exciting for your kids!

We're doing as many activities as possible right now to keep kids off of screens when they're not doing their video lessons for schoolwork.

Have you and your kids ever played with water beads before? What do you love/dislike about them?

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Wishing you a wonderful week filled with fun!