Simple Thanksgiving Sensory Small World

Every year I roast up our pumpkin seeds from the Jack-O-Lanterns.   They usually go pretty quick around here.  This year, though, it seemed the seeds were kind of woody.  They hung around for over a week, and I was about to pitch them in the trash, when I decided to use them for simple Thanksgiving Sensory Play.

I grabbed our big round sensory tub and added the roasted pumpkin seeds.  It just didn’t seem like enough at the bottom of our large tub, so I decided to add some of our rainbow rice using the fall colors of orange, green, and yellow.

Then I added a strand of colorful beads, reminiscent of the beads the settlers and Native Americans may have traded,  and the turkeys from our animal collection.  I knew my husband had a couple Playmobil Native American figures in his old collection, but I was surprised to find a teepee as well.

Since we didn’t have any actual pilgrim characters, I settled on a Playmobil knight, and covered his silver armor with black construction paper and made him a little hat.

I sprinkled a tiny bit of cinnamon across the seeds and added a few of our clear plastic pumpkins from our earlier fall sensory bin.

The kids could NOT wait to get their hands on it!  I loved watching them recreate parts of the Thanksgiving story that we’ve talked about.

I also loved how the colored rice swirled with the pumpkin seeds, and at some point plastic dishes were involved as they dished up quite a colorful Thanksgiving feast.

This simple Thanksgiving sensory is the perfect use for some of those leftover pumpkin seeds.