If your kids love water beads but you hate the mess, consider these eye-catching sensory bags. Kids still get the look and squishy tactile fun, without the risk of all those beads skittering across the floor!

To set up, it helps to buy a rainbow pack of water beads where each color comes separately; I promise that you don’t want to try to sorting water beads once saturated.

I filled a zip-top bag with about 1 tablespoon of each bead color, then added water so they could soak overnight. If you notice the beads have absorbed all the water, just add a bit more.

In the morning, the bags were full! I dumped out about half the beads from each to make room, then added a little extra water and tinted it with the appropriate color of food coloring. Seal tightly (it helps to add a strip of duct tape for extra security!) and hand over to your tots.

These are great lying flat on the ground so Veronika could see the beads. She loved that she could push the beads through the water inside with her fingers.

But she also loved picking them up and tossing them! Having the full rainbow is great for teaching ROYGBIV order of course, as well as visually gorgeous.

For all that effort to seal the beads up, she did still want to play with some beads out of the bag. So I poured the extras into a wide bin. Pretty soon, toys were swimming through, and big brother Travis needed to join the fun. Luckily, not too many went skittering away!