Fall booking Class-size and multi-room orders · Priority production for POs by September 30, delivered by December 11 · Most orders arrive in 6 to 8 weeks, and we confirm your window on the quote. · Later purchase orders are accommodated as lead time allows.
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Outfit Your Setting Your cart becomes your quote
Wooden digger- and truck-shaped sensory trays filled with dyed pasta, coffee beans, and grains in a sensory bin for Sensory Play classrooms.

Sensory Play

Sensory & Self-Regulation Lab

Maple play trays, discovery trays, sand trays, and calm-corner tools for Pre-K to Grade 3: fine-motor work, focus, and a steadier morning.

Section 01  ·  Pre-K to Grade 3
For budget & procurement

Built for the self-regulation work OTs and SLPs support: fine-motor control, sensory input, and the reset that lets a child rejoin the group. Each tray and tool supports common IEP and OT goals, and we provide an alignment letter on request. Schools commonly fund these through IDEA or general classroom budgets. Final eligibility is determined by your school, district, or organization.

Net 60 on a purchase order Exemption certificates W-9 and vendor forms on request Quote held 45 days Stock and lead time confirmed before the PO Request an alignment letter →
Ages 3+ · Pre-K to Grade 3 Self-regulation Maple, made in the USA Food-safe oil finish IKEA Flisat compatible Made to order

Solid maple, made to order, and shaped for play. Slow goods, on purpose.

Sensory play asks children to slow down, and the materials have to allow it. Button & Bug trays are designed by a licensed pediatric occupational therapist and made to order in a small Michigan workshop, and they hold up to a room that uses them every day. Wooden Story sets are made by hand in southern Poland, and Papoose trays are hand-finished hardwood. What these workshops have in common is that none of them can take a purchase order or wait sixty days to be paid. Standing in for them is the whole job.

A child reaches into a Button & Bug cake-shaped sensory tray filled with colored pasta and rainbow rice at a Flisat table.
What Sensory Play Holds

The hand remembers what the mind forgets.

Before a child grips a pencil, she fills a scoop. Before she counts, she sorts. Before she can name a feeling, she squeezes a ball of dough until she feels calm again. Sensory Play is the toolkit for that early, hands-first learning: maple trays sized for the Flisat, dual-sided tracing inserts, discovery trays, and sand trays for the morning-meeting reset. It requires no batteries and no instructions, only texture, attention, and unhurried time.

Sensory Integration

Texture, weight, smell: how the body learns.

Fine Motor

Scoop, pinch, pour, trace, place.

Self-Regulation

The quiet tool that resets a morning.

OT & SLP-Friendly

Often funded through IDEA Part B, via a student's IEP. Final eligibility is determined by your district.

In this section

Slow-made, tactile materials for fine-motor work, focus, and a steadier morning.

Featured
Collections
Curated sets
01 The Imaginative Play Range
Fill it with rainbow rice on Monday morning. By Tuesday, children have sorted by color, built a story, and asked to refill it themselves.
Button & Bug dual-sided maple letter-tracing insert with an uppercase alphabet, a finger tracing a letter; fits the IKEA Flisat table. [ FEATURED PRODUCT 2  ·  LETTER TRACING INSERT, dual-sided maple insert sitting in an IKEA Flisat, uppercase alphabet face up, child's finger tracing the curve of an ‘S’; small bowl of lentils to the side for resistance-tracing. Mirrors catalog pg. 8 hero. ]
Button & Bug  ·  Literacy

Letter Tracing Insert.

Trace letters by finger, before the pencil.

The grooves guide the finger through letter shapes, building pre-writing skills through pure tactile play. Designed by a pediatric occupational therapist.

“We pair it with the sand tray and the children spend twenty minutes tracing letters with their fingers before they ever pick up a pencil.”

Tracy M.  ·  Pre-K Teacher

Pairs with: the Sand Tray with Accessories and the Sand Tray with Flashcard Holder, for resistance tracing before the pencil.

$80
02 Loose Parts & Discovery
Papoose carved hardwood rockpool sorting tray with wooden tongs, sea glass, pebbles, and shells arranged in the wells, an open-ended sensory and fine-motor tool for early-years classrooms. [ FEATURED  ·  ROCKPOOL TRAY & TONGS, a child uses small wooden tongs to place sea glass, pebbles, and shells into the carved wells of a hardwood tray, scallop and conch shells arranged around it on cream linen. Mirrors catalog pg. 12 cell 04. ]
Papoose  ·  Featured

Rockpool Tray and Tongs.

Carved hardwood. Sorting wells. Tongs for slow, focused work.

A tide pool you can set on a table. Hand-finished hardwood with shallow wells, a pair of wooden tongs, and whatever the season offers: sea glass, pebbles, shells, seed pods. Children sort by color and size, pinch each piece into its well, and settle into the kind of quiet, repetitive placement work that steadies a busy room after recess.

$80
Stillness invites attention inward. Quiet tools for the kind of classroom transitions that keep a morning from unraveling.
03 Tools for Calm, Focus, and Regulation
A child’s hand reaches into a maple Rainbow sensory tray filled with dyed pasta, rainbow rice and colored beans, set in a classroom sensory table.
Why sensory play

A child learns the world by handling it.

Before a child can be told how the world works, they find out by touching it. That is not a soft claim about childhood. It is the reason the material a tray is made from changes what a child learns at it.

Temperature

Wood trades heat with the hand. Hold it and it warms, then gives that warmth back. Plastic stays at one temperature however long a child holds it, so the object never answers the body.

Weight

A wooden object weighs about what its size suggests. Molded plastic breaks that link, so the biggest thing on the table can be the lightest thing on it. The child is quietly learning a rule that is not true.

Sound

Wood sounds only when it is struck, stacked, or rubbed, so what a child hears carries the density of the piece and changes with what they just did. A speaker makes the same sound either way.

Irregularity

A machined block asks nothing of a child, because every one is identical. A piece with its bark still on has to be understood before it can be balanced, which turns stacking into a problem to solve rather than a procedure to repeat.

Every tray in this section is cut from solid maple, one silhouette at a time, with the wells shaped to what goes in them.

This way of comparing materials comes from Q Toys, who set it out in their own writing on sensory design.

Eight senses, not five

Most of us were taught five.

Touch, hearing, sight, smell, and taste are the five most of us learned. An occupational therapist works with eight, and the other three are the ones a sensory tray reaches best, because a child can only train them by moving and handling.

Movement

The vestibular sense tracks where the body is in relation to gravity.

Pressure

Proprioception tracks where the body is in space, and a child feels it through the joints and muscles.

Internal state

Interoception covers hunger, pain, and the feeling that arrives just before an emotion does.

The eight-sense framing follows Ashley of Button & Bug, a pediatric occupational therapist (MS, OTR/L) who designs the range in this section.

These are classroom materials, not clinical tools, and nothing here replaces occupational therapy where a child needs it.

Verified reviews

What educators and therapists say.

Next level for the classroom

As a consultant occupational therapist doing whole-class mindfulness and self-regulation, these yoga cards have been a blessing. The kids love them, and the teachers love them too.

Ruthie  ·  Occupational therapist  ·  Yoga Cards

A useful classroom tool

A useful tool to support kids in breathing practices. Very durable, and I love the color combination. Will be purchasing again.

Briana  ·  Verified reviewer  ·  Mindfulness Magic Ball

So good

Beautifully illustrated, with the perfect little rhymes to help little ones through the poses. My preschoolers were delighted with them all.

Tristen  ·  Preschool teacher  ·  Yoga Cards

Excellent tool

I use these in speech and myofunctional therapy for kids working on breath control and nasal breathing. The kids are enjoying it and it has worked exactly as I hoped.

Kayla  ·  Speech therapist  ·  Mindfulness Magic Ball

Hours of play

Love it. This is going to provide hours of play for my preschool class.

Christine  ·  Preschool teacher  ·  Build Your Set

Paying for this

One room or a whole school, many ways to pay for it.

Districts issue a purchase order and are invoiced Net 60. Private practices, microschools, libraries, and homeschool co-ops pay by card, or we invoice you directly, with no purchase order needed. We give you the paperwork either way.

Open an educator accountHow schools fund this
Priority PO by
September 30
Delivered by
December 11
Quote turnaround
2 business days, held 45 days
Terms
Card, invoice, or Net 60 for approved districts

The whole sensory corner

Outfit your setting in one quote.

Each kit is priced at the sum of its parts. What you are buying is fewer lines on the requisition, not a bundle.

Sensory Play can be ordered as sets or by the piece. Take the ready-made Self-Regulation Set, or build a tray range of your own in the Imaginative Play Range above.

CATALOG SETS  ·  ONE-ON-ONE CURATION

Tray Range  ·  MTW-SP-TR6

The Six-Tray Starter Set.

Choose your six designs.

$480

Six sectioned Button & Bug trays, in the designs you choose, for sensory bins, small worlds, and sorting work. Repeat a design to run the same station at several places at once, or spread them across six. All eleven designs are the same price. Single trays are on the range page.

  • Six trays, your choice of design. Repeat a design for multiples:
    1
    2
    3
    4
    5
    6
  • Letter Tracing Insert, MTW-SP-LTI, if you want it:

Tray sets are cut and finished to your chosen designs, so they are made to order and cannot be returned. Your chosen designs appear on the quote, which we send for approval before the purchase order is issued.

Included in The Whole Sensory Corner (MTW-SP-WSC). Ordering both duplicates these items.

View full details →

Calm Corner  ·  MTW-SP-CRS

The Self-Regulation Set.

Calm-corner essentials.

$299

The quiet-corner essentials for morning meeting and post-recess reset.

WARNING: CHOKING HAZARD. Loose sand and wooden balls. Not for children under 3 yrs.

Included in The Whole Sensory Corner (MTW-SP-WSC). Ordering both duplicates these items.

View full details →
Net 60 & purchase orders

Building a whole room?

Tell us your room count and what you need. We will price it as one quote on one purchase order, and reply within 2 business days.

Request a quote