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!

How I Set it Up:

• To begin with, I laid out our plastic sheet on the floor, which I do before any of our sensory play set ups. 
• Then, I placed two trays on the sheet. In one I poured the rainbow rice. In the other, I placed the puzzle sheet. 

• I then took out the pieces of the puzzle and dunked them into the rainbow rice bin and shuffled around to hid them in the rice.

• I asked the little one to search for the pieces one by one in the rice bin and place them in their slots on the puzzle sheet till he finds all the letters.

He loved the game and repeated it several times over at one go :)