Glow in the Dark Letter Matching Sensory Bin

Here’s a new twist on learning letter! Make a glow in the dark letter matching sensory bin!  Sensory bins are always fun for kids, from infants to preschool and beyond, and we can’t get enough of them.  My daughter and the daycare girls love to play in sensory bins. This simple glow in the dark letter matching game is based on our letter hunt water bead bin, it’s a fun way for them to explore and practice some more letter matching. 

Don’t have a black light? No problem! The girls have used this repeatedly in the natural light and enjoy it just the same.

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This sensory bin contains polyfill pellets and DIY letters I made from neon glue-based from these invisible letters over at I Can Teach My Child.  I know it sounds a bit time consuming to make the letters (or numbers which we also used) from hot glue but let me tell you it was very simple to do!

Glow in the Dark Letter Matching Sensory Bin

Materials needed:

• Neon Colored Hot Glue Sticks (I got ours at Wal-Mart)
• Hot Glue Gun
• Pan/cookie sheet

I used the colored glue sticks to create the letters.  I made the letters that we wanted by simply writing them out in glue on our crafting pie pan (we use this one especially for crafting, like making our Melted Bead Suncatchers). They are much easier than you’d expect, just a quick squeeze of glue in the letter you want and presto!

If you don’t have a pan handy you can use wax paper too. Just be away that you may have a bit of an issue with them sticking to wax paper. They slide right off the pans but wax paper (and tin foil) took a bit of peeling in my experience.

Once they cooled (a matter of minutes) I pulled and excess glue ‘strings’ off them and tossed them into a container with our Polyfil pellets and some tweezers/tongs.

A bit later we brought out the black light and had some glow in the dark letter matching fun! The neon-colored glue works perfectly with the black light for glow in the dark letters!  My soon-to-be preschool-aged girls loved this! You can find more of our blacklight activities here if you want more blacklight activities too.

Now if you don’t have a blacklight don’t worry about it! Even if it’s not glowing this is a fun activity and the girls played with this for quite a while in minus the black light.

My girls are just starting to work on letter recognition. This glow in the dark letter matching activity will get definitely lots of use as we add more and more letters to their list!

Want more sensory bin ideas? Click one of the images below: 

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