Ha! I know it’s not normal to laugh at your own jokes, but the title of todays blog really tickled me hehehe #SorryNotSorry 😛
Today is officially the first day of Autumn, and while I love most of the things Autumn brings, the rain and cold weather is making things pretty rubbish – Boe LOVES being outside, but the cold weather is my main Fibro trigger, so I’ve been trying to come up with great ideas to keep him busy indoors after he’s had a little while out in the crunchy leaves getting some fresh air.
It’s been a while since Boe and I just messed about with open ended play, and we were both missing the sandpit a lot, so I decided to bring out the rice and oats from the kitchen cupboards.
I remember seeing a pin on Pinterest a few months ago on how to colour rice and oats, and as we’d FINALLY got round to buying some food colouring on our last trip to Aldi, I was feeling brave enough to make our treasure box a bit more colourful.
The pins I found were all the same, to be honest. 1.5 tablespoons of water, 8-10 drops of food colouring, and a cup of oats. Well, I can tell you, that no matter how many times I attempted to do that, every batch turned out crap. It’s over 24 hours since I coloured the oats and the blue batch STILL isn’t dry yet, and the green oats are just rubbish.
I moved on to the rice…. some vinegar food colouring and some rice (I forget the exact measurements). The results were pretty much the same. Poop. To be fair it had coloured slightly, but not like all the pictures on blogs that I’d found.
So I posted in one of the education groups I’m in on Facebook and asked how on earth they do it as nothing I was trying from these blogs were working.
Paint seemed to be the most popular answer, which got me SOOO excited as Boe has the most gorgeous coloured paints (as you’d expect lol).
So I set to work. This time it was much easier, and this is how I did it:
You’ll need:
Food bags (zip lock bags are most recommended, but I live life on the edge and used normal food bags with handles)
Paint
Rice (I’d given up on the oats. ain’t got time for that ha!).
I poured a random amount of uncooked rice into the food bag, then added a few squirts of paint (I used a lot of the teal as I wanted this colour to really pop), then shake the bag for a bit (after it’s done up, obviously), and it’ll colour the rice. I also let my fingers get to work and rubbed the paint into the rice as well to make sure the paint was all spread out.
Once it’s all coated to the shade you want, pour the rice on to a sheet of baking paper and leave to dry.
In a few hours you should have the most amazing coloured rice.
This is the teal…. just look at it… how could this colour not make your heart happy?
Once it had all dried, I mixed the light blue and teal rice together and added in the grean oats just for a little different texture into a black box from the blue and yellow shop of dreams (or Ikea as it’s more known), and popped it in the lounge with Boe.
After I’d let him have a feel of it all, I burried a peg to see if he could find it, which he loved.
I’m not kidding, almost three hours he sat there and played with the rice, burrying his peg, fingers and toes, letting it fall through his fingers like sand, pretending that it was raining, having a little treasure hunt for all sorts of small bits and pieces…. the list was endless with what we were doing.
Alfie Bear has come to stay with us for a week from playgroup, so Boe decided he had to join in on the rice fun as well. I’m SURE he enjoyed it just as much as Boe and I did ?
We’re starting on our ?? Autumn ?? box tomorrow, with yellow, brown, red and orange coloured rice, some leaves and other autumny items. I’ll be sure to take more step by step photos for you for that box, so you can see how we *literally* just throw it all together lol.
Boe had so much fun playing around with this box that it will no doubt be featured in our week in some stage for months to come.
Is it wrong that I’m already planning the winter box already? hahah.
I’m SO excited about the many ways that we can take this rice play in the future……
I’ll make sure to keep you all updated in future blogs – maybe you can make some too if you have tiddlers and we can swap ideas and photos on our Facebook Page?
Have a happy weekend…. we’re all off to meet Optimus Prime tomorrow after my acupuncture appointment with Sarah 😉 I cannot freaking wait ?
Plinky & Boe xx