One batch of rice and two three different projects for two very different ages AND everyone is a happy camper! (including Mom) I had so much fun with this! It was so pretty and colorful I couldn’t resist scooping up handfuls of it myself.
If you read my post on Colored Water Bottles for Baby you probably saw that the munchkin man had a lot of fun playing with his brightly colored bottles of water. More than I ever expected. That was encouraging, and I wanted to see if I could come up with another idea that he would go for. Enter the colored rice. I’d been looking for an excuse to make it anyway. I had a few empty baby food jars hanging around and decided to make baby shakers for him. I thought about using plastic Easter eggs because he already likes to play with those but I really wanted him to get the visual of seeing the colored rice. I tried to fill each jar with a slightly different amount of rice so they would each sound and feel a little different and I also used different sized jars to hopefully enhance the experience. I hot glued the lids to the jars this time just to be safe 🙂
‘C’ had fun with this one. He spied them on the kitchen counter before I even intended to put them in front of him and he reached for them right away. The colors definitely caught his eye. (Good choice going with the clear jars with lots of color Mom…very visually enticing). He’s cutting a tooth so he spent much more time trying to chew on them than anything else, but he did enjoy rolling them around quite a bit. He did a lot of picking them up and putting them down, constantly switching which one he had in his hands. Piling them up in his lap was a favorite. He seem to love just holding them up and inspecting them.
We used this same batch of colored rice to “paint” Easter eggs cut out of card stock which you can read about in this post.
Lastly… (I’m dubbing this one the accidental project). I was planning on being done after we did the Easter Eggs. ‘A’ was not.
With those two projects complete there was rice left over and ‘A’ just couldn’t resist playing with it. He asked me if he could mix it in a plastic bag. Sure! He started to layer it up.
Then decide to just shake it all up and mix. He dubbed that “tie died rice”. He played with that for awhile. He described it as “a stress ball in a bag”. cute perception.
Then he decided to hide things in it to try and find. (kind of like his “Find It” game). That reminded me of a pin I have from Pink and Green Mama. You can see her project for I Spy Bottles here. I had pinned it in hopes of doing them with the kids one day. I still fully intend to turn that into rice in a bottle project one day. Those bottles she made are too cute! Anyhow, ‘A’ had a great time searching for items around the house to hide in his find it bag. It ended up being a great activity. I must remember if I do this again to let the kids scour their rooms for things to put in the bag. He came up with things like, a pencil cap, piece of gold, various coins, mini erasers, etc.
He was having too much fun! He wanted to make more colored rice, so we did. We experimented to see if we mixed two different colors of food coloring in with the rice would it blend well? Could we make purple rice? We did… and so the “find it” bag grew. ‘A’ even wrote out a list of things to keep with the bag so people could check things off as they found them (all his idea btw). I love his 7 year old mind. This actually became quite the activity even though I hadn’t planned anything beyond decorating Easter Eggs lol. Just goes to show you what you can unlock in a child’s mind by giving them a few simple materials to work with. He has already come up and idea for another colored rice project (but I’m out of rice at the moment!).
So there you have it. One batch of rice, three different projects and a lot of fun for all age groups. Not to mention and empty bag of rice. Time to buy more and get on with fun!
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