Colorful Rice- Make Your Sensory Rice Bin Even Better!
In our household we absolutely LOVE a good sensory bin. By “sensory bin” I simply mean any ol’ bin or container you have laying around your house. Making colorful rice was a super fun and easy activity. My toddler loved adding the food coloring to the bag and shaking it all up. Hope you guys have as much fun as we did making ours!
Materials for Colorful Sensory Rice:
- Rice (I used five bags because I have a big sensory bin and I wanted to fill it)
- Rubbing Alcohol
- Food Coloring (whichever colors you’d like to make)
- Gallon plastic bags
- Paper Towels
- Pan(s) (for drying the rice)
What’s more fun than colorful rice?! Rice is perfect to use because the grains are so small that you can use a ton of different tools and objects in the bin. Some ideas of different “tools” to use would be: spoons, measuring cups, funnels, plastic bottles, bowls, etc.
So first thing first…
Step One:
Decide how many colors you want to create. Then grab that number of gallon bags. You’ll designate one color to each bag.
Step Two:
Next, open the bags of rice and pour them into the gallon plastic bags.
Step Three:
Then put in about 5 drops of food coloring per one cup of rice. You can always add more food coloring. The more food coloring you use, the bolder your colors will be.
Step Four:
Next add in about 1 teaspoon of rubbing alcohol (no need for complete accuracy here folks). The rubbing alcohol helps to spread the food coloring around evenly. If you notice that your food coloring isn’t blending in nicely with the rice, add a tad more rubbing alcohol.
Step Five:
Shake it up! Give the bag a good shake and move the grains around so all of the rice gets colorful!
*If you notice that the color isn’t covering all of the rice grains then add in a tad more rubbing alcohol.
Step Six:
Repeat these steps for each color that you want to create.
Step Seven:
Finally, once you’ve colored all of the rice it is time to let it dry! Depending on how many cups of rice you made, the drying time will vary. It’s usually around an hour but because I used five bags, the dry time was almost 3 hours long.
Step Eight:
You’re all set to have some colorful sensory rice fun! Pour the rice into your sensory bin and let the fun begin!
