Rainbow Rice Construction Site for Kids

I LOVE rainbow rice…no really I LOVE it.  It is so pretty, easy to make, and such a great play material.  It’s so versatile, we add it to sensory trays, discovery bottles, and make small worlds out of it.

I made up a batch of rainbow rice (instructions at end of post) a while ago and pulled it out about a month later to play with it again.  I wasn’t quite sure how to play with it, so I asked J.  He suggested making a construction site, so that’s exactly what we did.

I simply dumped the bag of rice into a plastic box, added a few rocks, and all his construction vehicles.  The boy went to town!

He filled the dump trucks using his excavators and loaders, and then took the full dump truck to the “city dump” to dump his load of rice.  He also really liked to just bury his hands in the rice to feel the cool rice against his skin.

This kept him interested and engaged for about an hour…which is forever for a three year old!

Rainbow Rice Instructions.

This is the simplest way I’ve found to make rainbow rice, and I usually already have everything I need.

• Dump rice into separate ziploc bags, one per color.
• Squirt two or three big squirts of hand sanitizer into the each bag.
• Add a good squirt of food coloring to each bag…one color  per bag.
• Shake up the bag to get the color distributed equally.
• I let the rice sit in the bags for a  bit (maybe 30 minutes).
• Pour out the rice onto paper towels laid out on the table, counter, or cookie sheets, and smooth out the rice and let it dry.  It doesn’t take long to dry…maybe 30 minutes or longer.  I just check on it every once in a while.

A few notes:

• The food coloring will not come off on your hands if the rice is dry.
• This lasts forever and can be used over and over again.  The color does fade and become less vibrant over time.
• You can use the same instructions for dying pasta too!

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