This fun and easy letter matching St. Patrick’s Day Sensory Bin is a great sensory play activity for toddlers, preschoolers, Kindergartners, and more. It includes a free letter matching and letter recognition sheet.

This sensory bin works on fine motor skills, letter recognition, alphabetical order,  and more. Children will love scooping and pouring the sensory base, finding the letters hidden in the sensory base, and practicing writing letters or matching uppercase to uppercase or uppercase to lowercase.

For this St. Patrick’s sensory bin you will need a sensory bin, sensory bin base such as rice, dyed pasta, beans, etc…, scoops and bowls, the free letter coins, and the free pot of gold recording sheet.

For other fun sensory play ideas be sure also to check out this if you give a mouse a cookie sensory bin or the farm themed sensory play tray.

Feed a Leprechaun Sensory Bin Set-Up Tips

To start the activity off you can always start with a St. Patrick’s Day themed book. Some of our favorites include “There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Clover” or “Ten Lucky Leprechauns.” Then create your sensory bin. Once it is created you can allow children to play and explore.

When setting up your sensory bin you will need to start off by filling a small sensory bin with a sensory base. We usually like to make this St. Patrick’s day themed sensory tray with a green sensory base like split peas, green-dyed noodles, or green-dyed rice. You could also do rainbow rice or pasta to give it a different St. Patrick’s Day feel.

You will need to print out the free letter coins onto cardstock. You can choose to laminate them to help them last longer but usually, cardstock is good enough if doing this sensory play at home. If I am creating this for a classroom I always like to laminate them to help their longevity.

Once your letters are added to the base, add in scoops, cups, and anything else desired. You wouldn’t need additional items but they make the sensory bin more festive. Dollar Tree has some awesome shamrock toys, fake pots of gold, and fun St. Patrick’s Day decorations that would work great too.

I also like to reuse previous projects and combine them with sensory bins. This sensory bin goes great with our leprechaun craft for kids. You can simply make the leprechaun craft, cut out a hole instead of drawing on a mouth, and tape the leprechaun to a large bowl or cup. Then put the bowl inside the sensory bin and your little ones can feed the leprechaun the golden letter coins. Then play and enjoy!

Using the free St. Patrick’s Day Letter Recognition Printables for sensory play:

Depending on the skill you want to target you can print only the lowercase and use the lowercase matching form, print the uppercase and use the uppercase matching form, print the lowercase and match to the uppercase form, or print the uppercase and match to the lowercase form. For an extra challenge or working with multiple children you can print both sets and have each one look for a different set. 

Another way to use the letters and matching sheets would be to use the blank recording sheet, fill in the first letter and a few random letters, and then have little ones pick a letter and find where it goes in the alphabet and then write the letter in its spot.

Other ways to use the letter coins and recording sheets would be to play a matching game, lay them all out upside down, and have little ones flip two over at a time until they find a match. Or bury two of the same letter and see if they can find both hiding in the sensory base.