This homemade colored rice is a brilliant sensory activity to use over and over again! Reader Mallory shows how to make it and shares what she and her kids did for activities with it. (Note that this post contains affiliate links to help support hands on : as we grow.)
I found one project to make a three part project.
Making Homemade Colored Rice
First I started with a 5 lb bag of plain white rice and a set of 3 primary food colors.
The recipe we used was 1 cup of dry rice, 10 drops of food coloring and 1 tsp of water. (I doubled the recipe to make a lot of colored rice!)
I gave the kids big bowls of rice and 1 cup measuring cups and let them measure out the rice and dump it into ziploc bags.
I added the food coloring and water and zipped them shut (don’t squeeze the air out, they shake easier with air in the bag) and let the kids shake them up to dye the rice.
We used the 3 primary colors and then mixed the primary colors to make the secondary colors which was a fun lesson in color mixing. The kids loved doing the shaking and seeing what color the rice would turn.
Then we spread each bag of rice out on wax paper to dry over night – project one done.
Find more color mixing activities.
Colored Rice Art Project
The next day I cut a piece of cardboard to the size of a small canvas and laid a piece of clear contact paper sticky side up on the front of the cardboard. I secured the contact paper in place with packing tape on the back side of the cardboard.
I let the kids create their own rice art work by dropping and pressing the rice onto the sticky canvas.
When they were done I put another piece of clear contact paper sticky side down to seal the rice in place – project two done.
Colored Rice Sensory Bin
Then we dumped the rest of the colored rice into a large shallow storage bin.
We went to the kitchen and grabbed some random kitchen items – spoons, plastic cups, plastic bowls, cupcake tins, etc and the kids went to town playing in the rice.
The bin of rice has moved around from place to place both inside and out. My initial thought was to take it outside on the grass so I didn’t have a mess to clean up inside but I quickly found that it got dumped on the ground a lot so it got moved to the sidewalk so we could sweep it up and put it back in the bin but that brought dirt into the bucket. I would recommend keeping it inside.
Put down a large sheet or blanket so anything that gets spilled can easily be dumped back into the bucket and stays clean.
Project three done…..over and over and over.
The kids have played in it almost every day for the last two weeks and my one year old asks “rice? rice?” to play in it!
This was the best $5 I have spent and a lot of great memories have been created!
3 Activities in One! Homemade Colored Rice on handsonaswegrow.com
No comments:
Post a Comment