Sensory Rice

Lately, we have been spending a lot of time playing with rice and dry noodles. I decided to up the fun and colour the rice and pasta. It was relatively easy to do. I just separated the rice into different plastic bags, added a splash of vinegar and then a few drops of food colouring. After mixing everything together, I left the bags sitting open on my kitchen counter for a few days. A few times a day, I would break up any hard chunks in the bags. The pasta took longer to dry, but it could have been a case of too much vinegar. 


The kids love mixing, pouring, scooping and serving up the rice. Although the cupcake tin would lead you to believe that we are making cupcakes, Spiderman is really serving up ice cream with various toppings! We took turns roll-playing being the customer and requesting different toppings. It was interesting to see that he remembered which "topping" was suppose to be in which spot. We tackled some simple vocab words such as "more, less, pour, mix" as well as colours. 

Sunshine and Lightning McQueen were not interested in our cupcake game. They preferred to mix, pour and transfer the rice into various containers. Lightning is very into spoons right now, so I made sure to have a variety of different types and sizes of "scoopers" for him. 

Of course our coloured rice quickly ended up in the "sand" table. Fireman enjoyed mixing the coloured pasta and rice with the water. He was excited to watch it turn back to "white". We talked about the paste that is created when the rice and water combined. We enjoyed filling up our dump trucks and using our front end loaders to pour the rice into various sized bowls. 

We often play with rice inside, but it does scatter everywhere. I will usually set up our picnic blanket inside for the rice to stay on. It makes clean up (shaking it outside  easy. However today it was beautiful out so we enjoyed some time out on the deck. 

This all makes me thing... what else could I dye? 

Spiderman (3)
Fireman (3)
Sunshine (18 months)
Lightning McQueen (10 months)

Until next time! 
Alicia