Rainbow Rice Sensory Box

Okay, so I know I only shared a rice sensory box last month for valentines but rice bins are fast becoming my favourite go to activity. My children typically don't have staying power with activities but for some reason this goes against their short attention spans and play with it for ages. Earlier on in the week I knew I would be solo parenting at the weekend and I knew that we were forecast some very dodgy weather (seriously its the middle of March, we shouldn't be having snow!) so I needed to have activities in place if I wanted us all to make it to Monday,

So on Friday during the baby's nap time I made some coloured rice. When dyeing rice I always use a recipe from Happy Hooligans. I let it dry overnight on some baking trays and it was good to go in the morning. I decided to use a plastic storage box to put the rice in and it contained it really well. I then laid out our tuff spot tray with a plastic mat underneath and placed the rice box in the middle. I then got out some of our favourite scooping items including our Learning Resources Handy Tools and laid them all around the tuff tray.

I initially set this up as a colour sorting activity but that lasted less than a minute, it soon became apparent that my lovely separated coloured piles of rice were not going to stay separated for much longer! Oliver (3) had the most fun mixing all the colours together. He spent ages pouring, scooping and dropping the rice. His big sister (6) even joined in the fun and they played beautifully with the rice for well over half an hour. I did leave it out for most of the day as they kept coming back to it. They even took their socks off and were standing in it at one point.

The rule is that the rice must stay in the tuff spot and they mostly adhered to this. I would say it was 85% in the tuff spot, 10% on the mat and 5% on the surrounding carpet so the clean up wasn't too bad. They scooped most of the tuff spot rice back into the box and then I simply lifted the tray and poured any leftovers back in. Same with the mat, I just gathered it up and poured it back in. I didn't bother trying to recover the 5% that had made its way onto the carpet. I simply brushed it into a pile and binned and any remaining stragglers were captured by the vacuum. I've stored the rice in an airtight container ready for next time.

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