Re-dyeing Rice for Sensory Play

Have you ever wondered what do with rice that was used in sensory play once your carefully constructed rainbow of colors has all been mixed together? As we were discussing it yesterday on the Life Over C’s Facebook page, I decided to find out how well re-dyeing rice for sensory play would work.

Check out the results!

The pastel rainbow rice was leftover from an after Easter eggs dyeing session (which I may have forgotten to blog about *cough* *cough*). Anyway, the gist of it was that we used the left over egg dyeing water, to create some beautiful pastel rainbow rice.

After the kids played with it, the rice became a beautiful mix of pastels. Which they played with several times.

However, there comes a point when they get bored with playing with the same old rice and it’s time to bring in a new sensory experience.

So tonight, I took the mixed up rainbow rice and created this:

I haven’t put it into a sensory bin yet, so you are seeing it freshly made.

To re-dye the rice, I simply repeated the normal method for dyeing rice, but chose some darker colors.

I actually chose some very dark colors, but I think that anything a shade or two darker than the original would work just fine.

Here’s what I used for each color:
10 pumps of Purell hand sanitizer
1 small scoop of gel food dye
Gallon-size zip top bag
2 cups of rice

Throw it all in a bag, zip the top and mix until all the rice is coated with the dye.

Then set it on a tray to dry. Ours took about 15 minutes to dry.

It’s ready for use in whatever sensory activity you dream up! This is a great way to save money on materials for sensory activities. While rice is relatively inexpensive, I love to get the most out of everything that we use.

Check back tomorrow to see what we do with ours!