I have been wanting to dye some rainbow rice ever since I saw this come across my google reader. I decided to go ahead and make a plain rice sensory tub first though. That way when I dye the rice later it will be all new and shiny. More bang for my buck. Yee haw.
Eventually I plan to put all of the rice in a rubbermaid box about the size of a shoe box. Of course first I need to find said box in the pit that is my half of the office. Hmm… that might take a while. I was tired of waiting though, so I decided just to use a pot. It worked great. I’ve been collecting some random treasures for a while with this sensory tub in mind. The idea was that Kate could dig around in the rice and find them.
This was fun for a while, but then Kate noticed that I had put the pot on a cookie sheet to try and minimize rice spillage. Kate took this as an invitation to transfer the rice to the cookie sheet. Not quite what I had in mind little one. Right about this time, I vaguely remembered some Montessori lesson about moving rice with spoons. Of course, maybe I was making it up, who knows. At any rate, I went with it and dug out some bowls and spoons. Raptor approved!
She particularly liked scooping the rice up with the spoon and putting in the bowl. Once the bowl was full she poured it back in the pot. This seemed to be a natural extension of her obsession with pouring water back and forth.
After a while she decided to put the tiny animals in the bowl and give them a rice blanket because they needed to go to bed. Adorable. It was slightly less adorable when she decided that she simply had to pour the whole pot of rice out on the cookie sheet. What can I say, at least she didn’t pour it on the floor. Still, I think that this might be an outside activity from now on. 🙂