Dyed Rice Sensory Play

Things will be a little different this week on Growing A Jeweled Rose.  We are traveling so I have some fun and creative guest posts to share with you from some of my favorite children's sites! I am so excited to have the lovely Cerys of Rainy Day Mum kicking off our week of guest posts today!   Many of you may recognize Cerys as she is the co-host of Tuesday Tots, and also responsible for my lovely new blog design.  Besides loving her site, she is a great friend in the play community.  Welcome Cerys!

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Hello, I'm Cerys from Rainy Day Mum and very excited to be over here at Growing a Jeweled Rose today with some Sensory play. I co-host Tuesday Tots with Crystal and I'm over the moon to be able to share one of our sensory play ideas with you over here.

I have recently dyed some rice for some small world play with my preschooler J and seeing the alternative ways that he has been playing with it it inspired me to set up some sensory play for T who is 16 months old.

Using the lid of a box and a mix of the different colored dyed rice I set it up on a table and invited T to play.   Dyed rice is such a great sensory experience and also brilliant for language learning - having different colours is a treat to the eyes, we were able to talk about the rainbow colors (ours was a mix of green, red and blue dyed rice) and how they are different, some are bright colors others are pale.

   

 She moved the rice around the tray - as she did we talked about how they felt, small, rough, rounded and when she rubbed them in her palm how they were hard. This is great for fine motor skills as well - she constantly tried to pick them up first with full hands and then moved onto the pincer grip. As she played she discovered how she could make sounds with the rice - her favourite lifting it up in her hands and letting it go on the plastic lid - the sound of rain according to J.

   

 We extended the activity with some pouring practice which also led to listening to the different sounds that it made against different materials. If your child is at the stage of putting everything in their mouth then rice maybe too small in which case you can swap the rice for dyed pasta which will have the same sensory experiences but on a larger scale and slightly safer.

To make the dyed rice:

I use food colouring and a ziplock bag to make our coloured rice - I've seen recipes for it using alchol but as I have a toddler that puts everything in their mouth I don't think that this is particularly safe. Instead I place the rice inside a ziplock bag and then add in a splash of food colouring and we have great fun shaking up the bag to cover the rice (I don't tend to go for even coverage as the different shade produces a lovely effect) and then leave it overnight to dry in the bag. There is a little transfer of the food colouring to the hands but it's minimum and will wash off straight away - but this is a lot safer than using alchol with the food colouring to dye the rice

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Cerys is from the United Kingdom and writes at Rainy Day Mum, she is a former teacher and marine biologist, now a stay at home mom to J and T.

Sharing indoor and outdoor activities for babies, toddlers and preschoolers ranging from art to zoo field trips she aims to make every day fun what ever the weather outside.

You can find Cerys on Rainy Day Mum, and can join her on facebook, follow on Twitter or see what ideas she's pinning on Pinterest.

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