Gather up the Polly Pockets and a few simple toys, and put together a Polly Pool Party water bin for your kids! This is a great way to keep toddlers and preschoolers entertained (and nice and cool) on a hot summer day. Ours kept the hooligans entertained for ages!
If your kids are like my daycare kids, they LOVE playing with water. We’ve done a ton of water play activities over the years, and our latest, this Polly Pool Party activity was a huge hit with the hooligans!
This is a terrific activity for a hot summer day. Just set it up in the shade under a tree, and the kids will play for ages, keeping cool and having fun.
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Our Polly bin is a little different than the other water bins we’ve played with lately because this one is oh-so pink and purplicious!
Add food colouring
To colour our water bin, I just added some pink food colouring to the water. You could add liquid watercolours as well. Don’t feel that it has to be pink though. Blue or green would be pretty and totally appropriate for a water bin.
To make your Polly Pool Party:
We added Polly Pockets and a few of our other plastic figures to the bin, like Dora and some little people animals. We also added a few features to Polly’s pool – boats and and water slide, some plastic bowls and glass beads. You could even add some water beads to add some more sensory fun to the bin.
Soapy bubbles are a must. The kids love playing in soapy water. Bubbles make everything more fun, don’t they? And they get the toys clean while the kids are playing.
The Hooligans had a great time with the activity bin, and after a little while one of them asked for a second bowl to play in.
I gave them our “washing up bowl” and filled it with water. This turned into a big game of scooping water, Pollys and beads from the big bin into the bowl. Then when the bowl was full, they’d pour it back into the bin.
Then there were many many requests for “more water”, “yellow this time!”, “blue this time”, “green this time”…
So I spent the next half hour or so filling up jugs of assorted coloured water.
Of course the water in the bin quickly became a murky brown, but that didn’t bother anyone. So much for pink and purplicious!
Oh well. It was pretty while it lasted!
More fun and easy water activities for toddlers and preschoolers:
Jackie is a mom, wife, home daycare provider, and the creative spirit behind Happy Hooligans. She specializes in kids’ crafts and activities, easy recipes, and parenting. In 1997, Jackie stepped out of the corporate world to start a family and to open her own home daycare. She began blogging in 2011, and today, Happy Hooligans inspires more than 2 million parents, caregivers and Early Years Professionals all over the globe.
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