Thursday, March 17, 2011

At the End of the Rainbow Rice

This St. Patrick’s Day, I was a little less motivated to go all out compared to last year. We did watch a video about this day on BrainPOP—we especially enjoyed looking at pictures of the Chicago River being changed to green afterward. Then we did a symmetrical shamrock painting since the girls had been learning about halves and quarters this week. I’d hoped to get to our rainbow rice dig for magnets {since rainbows go with this holiday a bit}, but we’ll get to magnets tomorrow as we finish up our week of the Letter M.  I’m also tucking away a great teaching tool on the Trinity using 3 leafed shamrocks from 2Teaching Mommies.

Rainbow rice is sensory bin filler I first saw on Pink and Green Mama.  Hers is beautiful as are others like Rockabye Butterfly’s below for St. Patrick’s Day. If you are not familiar with sensory bins, check out Counting Coconuts and 1+1+1=1 to get a better idea. After being inspired by an article that sensory bins were not too babyish for my age of girls, rice seemed like an easy to make option and is readily available in Portugal .

I used the directions from Pink and Green Mama. I loved that she used Purell, and we had a plethora of that! It was a great opportunity for the girls to practice measuring out one cup of rice at a time for each bag to be colored. I think we ended up making several cups of each color.

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Shaking up the rice with 5 squirts of Purell and 5 drops of food coloring per instructions. I guess we had to add much more because of how much we made?

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Then we laid the rice out in trays to dry. This led to some artistic landscaping rather than a nice ROYGBIV, but that’s ok.

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And mixed together in the bin waiting for some fun treasures to hide within! The Polly Pockets in our house have found a great new way to go swimming!

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Happy St. Patrick’s Day to you!

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