Rainbow Rice ABC Hunt | Sensory Play Ideas

A few weeks back, we made our own own Rainbow Rice at home. It is nothing but regular rice but in very pretty colours. These are coloured in food colouring and so are completely taste safe in case your little one decides to give them a little taste! If you have not made your self a bath of this pretty rice, do head over to my post on DIY Rainbow Rice and get cracking! It is super simple, you will be done in no time!

Once we had our rainbow rice ready, the first thing I did was to set up a Rainbow Rice Bin for him. I just let him explore and feel the coloured rice using different spoons, scooping tools and cups. There was no agenda, or plan. Just some fun rice play.

This time around, I gave the rainbow rice bin a more structure and combined our ABC foam puzzle to make it a fun ABC hunt game! I just took out the letter pieces from the puzzle, dunked them into the rice bin to hid them and then got the Mini to fish them out one by one and put the puzzle pieces back together!

The colourful rice and the colourful letters pieces of the puzzle went so well together that it was a riot of pretty colours! You could do this with wooden or plastic puzzle pieces too. I just found that the size of our foam ABC puzzle pieces were just the right size for this game so used them. Kept him happy and busy for a good amount of time as he wanted to do it over and over a few times!

Dump the ABC!

If you know my Mini a little, you will definitely know about his obsession for ABCs! He is truly madly deeply in love with the letters of the Alphabet that anything to do with letters, he is happy! Reading the wordings on our Tees, subtitles on TV, pages of books... well anything at all! :)

To encourage this interest of his, I set up lots of activities around letters for him. We have done letter recognition activities, letter cases matching activities and more recently have begun doing letter sound activities as well. 

This post is about a super fun little game that I made up for him, of course to do with letter and his favourite vehicle - the dump truck! The idea just popped up in my head and I couldn't wait to try it out. 

It is based around upper and lower case letters identification and matching. Mini knows his upper and lower case letters so this activity helped to reinforce that knowledge in a super fun way. 

He had to 'drive' his little dump truck, loaded with a capital letter at a time, through a maze that has lower case on either sides in random order. He had to find the matching lower case letter for the upper case letter that he is carrying in his dump truck and 'dump' the upper case letter at the correct dump spot! :D 

It was a super hit. Please go and try it if your tiny is a vehicle lover like mine! :)

Rainbow Rice Bin | Sensory Play Ideas

So, have you made your own batch of Rainbow Rice yet!? :) 

If not, go right over to my DIY Rainbow Rice post and make your mini a batch of it already! Its super easy and you will be done in no time!

If yes, yay! Read on to see some simple fun ways in which we enjoy rainbow rice sensory bin.

Scooping:

A few colourful stacking cups (a favourite toy from the Mini's babyhood days, re-purposed!), a shove, strainer and fork from a mini beach set and a few more random spoons of different sizes make for a lovely session of just scoop, fill and shove!

Mini Construction Vehicles Play:

Of course the little construction vehicles have to come in for some fun too! They always do :) So here is to more filling, scooping and dumping of gorgeous rainbow rice by tiny diggers and dump trucks.

Ice Cube Tray Counting:

This one was a self initiated activity by the Mini. I added an ice cube tray to the rice bin and he began filling the slots one by and one and went on to count them! So yeah, there you have a super fun counting activity as part of the rainbow rice bin! :) 

DIY Rainbow Rice | Coloured Rice for Sensory Play

I have seen multiple posts on Instagram on rainbow rice and every time I itched to make my own for my little fellow. Rainbow rice is nothing but plain rice grains, dyed with colour. Some use food colour while some just use acrylic colour. I was vary of using acrylic colours for this, so opted to go with my trusted gel food colours and just loved the colours I got in my rice grains.

I knew my boy would love it, especially since he has been introduced to rice bin and loves it... and is also a huge fan of all things colourful. Rainbow rice is a beautiful combination of both! Just like regular rice bin, the play option for rainbow rice bins are endless. It is more or less the same as regular rice bin, except this is so incredibly colourful and appeals to the visual senses!

It is super easy to make and if stored well, can last years over so many play sessions. It has been about 2 months now since I made ours and it is still as good as new. I store the coloured rice in Ziploc bag once done with play and keep it away. Make sure you don't get it wet as that may spoil the rice. If it does get wet, dry it out completely before storing it away.

Letter Sounds (of colours) Car Park

After the success of our first letter sound activity, I set up this second one for my little boy a few days back. This one too revolved around letter sounds but with a little twist. I set this game up like a fun car parking activity since my son loves parking his little cars and in fact just like watching actual vehicles being parked!

I used a long sheet of paper on which I drew a little track or a ramp. At the far end I added a few parking slots. On each parking slot, I added a sticky note and wrote a letter written on each. I placed a few of his toy cars at the other end of the ramp. 

He was to identify the colour of each car and then figure out the starting letter of the colour of the car, 'drive' it down the ramp and finally park the car in the corresponding car park marked with that sticky note letter! That is, Green car - G, Orange car - O, Brown / Blue / Black car - B etc. 

And so, he had fun with his little cars while practicing some letter sounds! :)

Guess the Letter - a Touch and Feel Game

I have been wanting to try a touch and feel activity with the Mini for a while now. An activity mainly focusing on his sense of touch. So, I had planned this particular game as a blindfold game initially, but turns out the little fellow is afraid of the dark and simply refused to wear the blindfold! 

Well...so, I had to DIY an empty cardboard box as plan B!

I cut out openings on the sides of the box and placed a bowl full of wooden letters inside. I made sure the Mini couldn't see the letters. He had to put his hands inside the box through the side cutouts and just touch each letter, feel it and try to guess without peeping! 

It took him a few attempts to understand the game and then he was on a roll! Honestly, it amazed me that he was able to do this activity way better than I had imagined. I did not think at 3 he would be able to get the concept and actually get going with the guessing. But he did! I am proud of my little guy and am glad I did try this with him.

The game was a huge hit with him, that he went on and on... Here he goes! :)

Popsicle Sticks - Upper and Lower Case Letters Match

The first activity that we did around upper and lower case identification was the one with building blocks. It was a fun little DIY that the Mini loved and I give that activity credit for actually helping him identify most of the lower case letters. 

So, ever since then I wanted to do a few more activities around the different cases and finally got around setting this one up. It is a simple DIY and can be easily made with items available around the house. I love cardboard box DIYs and this is one of the easiest of them all!

You can use simple plain coloured popsicle sticks for this, but I had fancy coloured ones and I loved the pop of colour they brought in to the set up as a good contrast to the brown of the cardboard box. So, its not a must that you use coloured popsicle sticks here, but if you like pretty things like me... try to get them! :D They should be available in most stationery supply stores.

This activity not only helps in upper and lower case letter identification and association, it also helps work on the fine motor skills of those little hands pushing the popsicle sticks through the slots on the cardboard. Mini had a lot of fun doing this over and over and after almost 6 months, he still enjoys playing with this DIY :)

Playdough Car Maze

I always try to keep a stock of my homemade playdough in the fridge for quick play set up when I am too tired to set up anything else for my boy or when I have nothing else planned or when he generally just asks to play with playdough! 

Playdough makes for a great free-play item. I have setup our simple playdough boards several times for him and it has always been loved. 

This time around too, we took out our stash of playdough and began making random shapes and forms out of the different coloured balls. Finally, we made them into long cylinders and shaped them into little spirals like chaklis or murukus! What a fabulous exercise it served as for our wrists and hand muscles.   

The bigger ones were made by me while the littler ones were made by the Mini. Once these spirals were made, I was just about pack them off back into their storage box when an idea struck me! I rolled out each spiral and made them into long pipes. I grabbed our white board and started placing these pipes on the board forming tiny roads.... I made a tiny maze for the Mini's toy vehicles!

I had real fun planning this mini maze for him with little dead-ends, bends and tracks. The riot of colours on the white board was just pleasing to the eye.

Mini had a riot of a time tracing the maze with each of his vehicles, exploring the dead-ends and turns along the way :)

Letter Sound and Object Match

Identifying the starting letters of words is one of Mini's latest favourite games. We play this orally multiple times a day, I just ask him 'what is the first letter of...' and he tries to guess the letter of the word. Of course I need to stress on the starting letter of each word, as he is just getting started on letter sounds.

So a couple of days back, I set up a game around his new interest. I used random stuff from around the house for this game. I wanted him to get familiar with letter sounds with everyday items first, before we move on to more complex words. I am very new to phonics too, in fact I am learning it along with him. I have no idea on how to teach him letter blending and so on... in fact for now, I plan to go slow on it and let his teachers at school take the lead, while just build a strong basic foundation of simple letter sound!

So, all the random stuff that I gathered, I put in a big basket and placed it along side a sheet of paper. I wanted to be able to quickly change the letters, so used sticky notes to mark letters on the sheet of paper and made little lanes. He had to pick one item at a time from the basket and place it in the corresponding letter lane based on the first letter.

Just as I expected, the little fellow wanted a variation in letters after playing it two times and I was glad I had used sticky notes, so I could easily change the letters for a new round of the same game. He did well on most items and needed my guidance on a few. Overall, he enjoyed it and I am sure we will be playing this a lot in the coming days.

Name - Fill in the Blanks

Mini's obsession of spelling his name continues and after our first game around name recognition, we played this one recently.  This one combines all his favourites - sticky notes, white board and his name! So obviously, it was a hit! :D

It required minimal preparation and was all done in just 5 minutes. I used a long strip of paper sheet and stuck it on our balcony wall - Oh, our balcony is our favourite activity hangout zone! We both love spending time there. 

This can be done in a smaller scale on a sheet of paper spread on a table, or directly on the white board or any other way that you can think of. He just loves the balcony space and I wanted him to enjoy running up and down in the process of this game, hence set it up larger scale.

Along with helping in name recognition, this game also serves the purpose of some fine motor skills as it requires him to carefully remove the sticky note off the white board and paste it just right in the appropriate blank space and press it at the right spot, to ensure it sticks well.