Have you seen those fun sensory bins or other sensory activities for toddlers and young kids? These water beads are a great sensory activity for all ages (3 and up) and they can also be used in vases and decorative bowls.
They start out as hard beads about 3/16″ in diameter and looking like this:
When you add water they grow and grow and grow! I thought at first the small little pouch probably wouldn’t fill my hurricane vase…
But I was surprised when less than an hour later I had to add more water and eventually dump half the beads into another container. This little pouch makes a LOT of water beads that measure about 1/2″ to 3/4″ in diameter.
I gave my daughter (almost 4) a spoon and some cups and she played for almost an hour, scooping and sorting them by color. There are about 12 different color beads.
She really liked the variety of colors, including pink, purple, green, yellow, orange, blue, white and black (opaque). You could separate them out by color if you wanted to have a bowl/vase of only one or two colors to match your decor.
Our only complaint was there were bits of broken beads as well as stringy pieces of the gel we had to scoop out and throw away, but this is to be expected with type of thing.
I received a sample of these beads for testing and review purposes.