Three Color Activities with Rice - Color Week

As promised here are three great activities to do with rice and color.
These could easily be spread over a few days but Dan had his brother over for a video game marathon and I was trying to keep Alice away from them.

You will need
Snack baggies
Rice
Food Coloring
A Cookie Sheet
A plastic Jar
Contrction Paper
Cotton Balls
Glue

That list will cover all three activities.

First we filled the snack baggies with Rice, about 1/4 cup each. Alice loved this part. Our rice is in a 5 gallon pail so it makes it easy for her to help.

One all the baggies are full add food coloring to them, mix colors if you are learning about secondary colors as we were. We did about 10 -15 drops per bag.

Then seal the bag very tightly and hand it over to an excited 2 year old (or whatever old you have) to shake and shake and shake

And shake
and shake
and shake
and clean up the exploding rice bags
and shake some more until they are all done.

Once you have shaken them all out carefully dump them out onto a cookie sheet (we lined ours with wax paper to save on mess)and organize beautifully.

You only want the rice to be about two deep. Once you have organized your rainbow of rice put in the over on warm for ten minutes. This helped all the dye to seep into ours so we didn't get any on our fingers. (yay)

This brings us to activity two


For this you need the black paper, glue and cotton balls (I used the cotton balls to spread the glue to make my rainbow). You will also need the now dried and cooled rice. I put this activity (which I am sure has been done before) together after I could only find glitter glue at the store.

Put your glue on your paper in the shape you desire. Depending on how you want to do it you can put it all on at once (like alice) or in stages for each color (like me).

Contemplate which of the wonderful colors you are going to use first.

And have at it.
Basically the concept is that you are using the rice as glitter, so however you usually use glitter is how you use the rice. Glitter is fun all on its own, but this was even better because we had made the rice.

Alices art
"A man on his side, like when dada falls down. And there is a smiley face. A line that goes like this." moves finger through the air.

Mine.
It's a rainbow, the purple blob was supposed to be a flower that simply loks likea blob.

On to Activity Number three.


Once you have glued your rice, and made the mess, clean it all up by putting it in your jar. I used glass - you should prbably use plastic as ours broke - whihc Alice thought was AWESOME.
Once you have a beatiful milticolored rice jar place lots of small toys in it a close the lid. You have just created an 'Eye Spy' jar. Your child can spin it around looking for the small toys. Alice loved hers... untill it broke. Then she just laughed and went to her princess dolls.


Happy Coloring!