Rainbow Rice!

This is a really easy play activity to do and any mess created can quickly and easily be swept up.

Eden's nearly 19 months old now, and is at the stage where she absolutely loves mixing and pouring! We were making playdough together the other day, she was helping me add the dry ingredients and all was going well until I added the water. All of a sudden her wonderful 'dry' mixture disappeared into a gloopy substance soon to become playdough and poor Eden dissolved into tears! Not the reaction that I was expecting! I happened to be videoing it at the time, and may have to create a post showing you.

Anyway, I thought as she enjoyed mixing the dry ingredients so much I would create some rainbow coloured rice for her to mix and stir. It was a big success! The method is really easy. All I did was buy a couple of big bags of bargain supermarket own-brand rice, add a few drops of food colouring and leave it to dry for abit. (Edited to clarify: No need to cook the rice first). I found that you only need the tiniest amount of food colouring, or else it will take ages to dry and the colour will transfer to fingers and hands when you play with it. 

Adding food colouring and leaving to dry

Mixing and stirring

Little colourful food measuring cups worked great as mini pourers

Learning a new word: 'Sprinkling'