Kids Co-op Link Up

 

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Its time for Kids Co-op. Please link up your child orientated posts. I will be linking up the following:

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(Goblin is 35 months)

I am sure nearly everyone who has ever read a blog has come across a rainbow rice tutorial by now. But just in case there is one lone person out there desperate to know how to colour rice so their kids can have a colourful sensory experience, I am throwing my hat into the ring with my second rainbow rice tutorial - you can find my first here. 

Before you start colouring your rice you should decide where you are going to dry it - it needs to be spread out so it will dry so you need a relatively large surface that your child isn't going to be able to get at. I chose a big under the bed storage box on top of the cooker so I could use the cooker's extractor fan - you will find out why in a minute. 

You will need

• rice
• surgical spirit or alcohol based antibacterial hand gel
• decent food colouring (we used Sugarflair Paste Colours)
• sandwich bags - zip lock or stick down are best (you can actually use regular plastic carrier bags if they haven't got breathing holes in them)

Decide how many colours you will use and take that many sandwich bags and fill them evenly with rice. Having said that if you have lots of darker colours you may want to make a larger quantity of the lighter colours - like yellow - to brighten up the rice once its all mixed together.

Once you have the rice in the bags add your food colouring. If you are using the pastes you really only need the tiniest amount (you can always add more). If you add too much it takes longer to dry and is more likely to leave clumps that will stain hands and clothes. 

Finally add a small squidge of hand gel or less than a tablespoon of surgical spirit to each bag. Rather than adding the gel to every bag I suggest adding to one at a time, then sealing that bag, shaking the contents until it looks like the colour has taken evenly, then moving to the next bag to add hand gel. The reason for this is that if you do all the bags and then start shaking by the time you get to the last one the alcohol may have evaporated a bit. 

Once you have all your rice coloured, pour the contents out onto your tray/tub/newspaper and leave over night for the alcohol to evaporate leaving dry coloured rice. This can really stink the room up and probably isn't great for your kids to inhale - hence me drying mine under an extractor fan. Don't be tempted to let your kids play with the rice before its completely dry unless you want to be picking rice off their clothes and your surfaces for weeks to come. 

Once its dry tip it out and Play!

And now for the linky

Stressed out by Messy Sensory Play?

(Goblin is 28 months)

In my post about water beads I mentioned that despite them going absolutely EVERYWHERE I stayed calm and actually found the experience quite amusing. In fact I am quite calm about mess from most forms of indoor sensory or messy play but this has not always been the case......

When I first started doing messy sensory play with Goblin I found the whole experience really quite stressful. I'd want to contain and limit the mess and I'd spend my entire time trying to make sure that rice or lentils or what ever we were playing with stayed on the mat or blanket I'd put down. I'd walk round the mat with a brush and dustpan brushing up any stray bean and putting it back on the mat. I'd snap at Goblin to play more carefully. And eventually my heart would be racing and there would be a constriction in my throat and I'd just yell "RIGHT THATS ENOUGH!" and man handle Goblin out of the way so I could sweep up the mess.

 

 Poor Goblin had no idea why I went from happy playful mum who lets him get his toys out, to totally crazy mentalist mum who screams and shouts while running around with a broom.

Fortunately it didn't take me long to realise that this reaction wasn't in any way beneficial to Goblin or to me. I had two choices: I could stop sensory messy play all together or I could get over it. But as Amanda at Dirt and Boogers explains in her post The Importance of Sensory Play, kids get a lot out of these experiences. So I opted to get over it. 

Here are some tips I used to help me 'Get Over It'.

1. Prepare your area. 
2. Accept that there will be mess.
3. Assume you will not be able to reuse the play materials. 
4. Get down and play with the material yourself. 
5. If you start to stress count to ten.
6. Do messy sensory play as often as possible

Preparing your area: If you prepare your area you may be able to contain some (but not all) the mess. I have a mat that always goes down. It is pretty useless at containing all the mess but it does make it easier to lift the bulk of the mess out the way fast. 

Accept there will be mess: If you assume their either won't be any mess or that you will be able to contain the mess, you will be disappointed. Mess is pretty much inevitable and the more you can accept it will happen the less stressed it will make you.  A subset to this is 'Don't run round with a brush during your child's play' - you will start to resent their play as it creates 'work' for you.

Assume you will not be able to reuse the play materials: We reused our rainbow rice for 6 months. But if you are worried about sweeping up every last scrap and placing it carefully back in the tub you will be more stressed out by the handful that disappears under the sofa. Lets face it, rainbow rice probably only costs £1 to make, it won't break the bank if you hoover half of it up.

Get down and play with the materials yourself:  Since I started playing with Goblin (using the digger to load the dumper truck with rainbow rice or painting on a big piece of paper) two things have happened - first I'm too interested in the play to notice the mess (especially as some of it is my fault) and secondly I have really started to appreciate why toddlers like this type of play, its very therapeutic.

If you start to stress, count to ten: When I do start to get a bit stressed by the mess - which is usually on the rare occasions I agree to let Goblin play with shaving foam (I HATE SHAVING FOAM) - I try to disengage for a bit by sitting on the sofa or making myself a coffee. Just long enough to remember why we are doing the activity in the first place. Of course this can completely backfire when you return to the room to discover your shaving foam covered toddler has decided to watch TV and got foam on the remotes, the sofa, the DVD shelves and pretty much every other surface in the room. "What the what? But I was only gone for two seconds!!!"

Do messy sensory play as often as possible: The more you do this, the less stressful it will become. 

 

If you are a relatively self aware person you will know whether you will be able to make this shift in approach. There are some extra things you can do to help if this feels more like a giant leap than a small step to the side. You could:

1. Start small: Try doing sensory play with much bigger easier to clean up items (like a whole tub of magnetic letters that your child can pour on the floor and mess up - it will test your ability to control your emotional reaction to mess)
2. Find a friend who enjoys sensory play and take your child to their house: If you don't have to deal with the clean up you may find the mess easier to handle. 

However I have a good friend for whom this type of play simply would not be possible. The thought of the mess would actually make them feel physically sick. If that's how you are feeling having read this post, I think the best advice I could give is 'Just don't do it'. Yes kids get a lot from sensory play, but I suspect they won't get much benefit if you are having a nervous breakdown while they play.

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Sensory Play day

(Goblin is 28 months)

Today was definitely a sensory play day. I didn't intend it to be, it just was.

We started off doing some painting. Goblin is still totally obsessed with vehicles which means every activity needs to involve trucks. So after I got the paint out for him he filled his dump truck with paint, then dumped it out onto the paper and drove through it. This was very much a Goblin led activity - I had no intention of painting with vehicles, but it turned out looking cool.

And the painting with trucks led to our second activity of the day which was washing the truck. 

This led to getting very wet which was a good trigger for having a shower and getting dressed - we have no real morning routine so unless we are going out Goblin and I quite often stay in our pyjamas until lunchtime, so getting dressed at 10am was impressive for both of us.

 Hublet bought Goblin a new truck yesterday. It is a giant Bruder Tipping Container Truck with CAT Skid Steer Loader. Its fantastic and obviously all Goblin wanted to do was play with it. But I was quite excited by what he did. He took out magnetic alphabet letters and emptied them all onto the floor.

Then he used his skid steer loader to lift them into the container truck. In fact he started to use all his vehicles - he used the combine harvester to sweep them into piles, and the bin lorry he used like a digger to collect letters.

It occurred to me that through this play he was learning so much coordination and he was making a plan and following it through. I have never really been one for sensory bins. They look pretty and I admire them on other people's blogs but I have never been bothered to make one myself. But this activity was a bit like a sensory bin. All the equipment was piled together and Goblin was making his own activities from it.

At one point I tried to steer the activity by encouraging Goblin to sort the letters by colour. But he wasn't interested and I rapidly abandoned it, seeing that he was getting much more benefit from what he was doing for himself.

Goblin switches activities quite quickly sometimes and before I really notices he'd moved on. Keeping the theme of filling his dumper trucks using his diggers and loaders. But this time he asked me to get down the red mat and he took out the split pea pot and the rainbow rice. For the first time since I made the rainbow rice in six months, Goblin mixed the rice with the lentils. It was always going to happen, I'm just amazed it took this long.

I was really surprised at the focus and length of time he dedicated to playing with the rice and peas. He asked me to get him some spoons and I lay down on the floor with him and used a teaspoon to help shift rice from the floor to one of the dumpers. It was strangely satisfying - I got a brief insite into why Goblin likes it so much.

Hublet discovered the other day that the cement mixer has an Archamedes screw in it. Goblin loves this and he spent a long time filling the mixer up and then turning the drum and watching the lentils and rice pour back out of the tube.

Although it looks like a horrendous mess it actually didn't take very long to clear up afterwards - which is just as well because today Goblin decided not to nap (he usually has at least one and sometimes two hour and a half naps in the day still).
So while I tidied up I encouraged Goblin to play in the garden.

He adores the sand pit and will dig in it for ages - note he took his diggers out with him.

We found a ladybird!

I was hoping to tire him out with a game of frisbee. Playing with Goblin was a bit like playing fetch with a dog. I'd throw the frisbee and he'd run and get it and bring it back. I did try and show him how to throw it but he seemed to prefer the running back and forth across the garden. He does love to run.

Later in the day Goblin found a wooden hammer. He started bashing things and I panicked that he'd break something important - especially as his lack of naps had made him slightly less responsive to the word 'no' (and considering he isn't particularly responsive at the best of times you can probably understand my panic). I found some corn rings in his snack cupboard. I lined them up on a tray and let him do his thing.

He loved it. We got through two big bags of corn crisps. They made a huge mess but it was so much fun. And Goblin ate a lot of the mess anyway.

While helping me clear up he enjoyed the sensory experiences that come from playing with a hoover. He got his hair stuck in it and stuck it to his jumper and of course no sensory experience is complete without putting it in your mouth!

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Y is for Yummy Yoghurt

(Goblin is 25 months)

I enjoyed doing Z with Goblin so much yesterday that I thought I'd give Y a try today. We didn't have much time to play because we were out most of the day. And to top it off my printer packed up so I couldn't print off the lovely printables we had yesterday. But we managed to do 'an art'.

Obviously I was focussing on Y is for Yellow. We stuck this next to the Z half way up the stairs. I was really impressed that Goblin remembered the letter Z sound when I took him up for his nappy change. And he made me stop on the way back down to have a little look at his handy work.

 I laid out his Y flash cards and bean bag and buried some Y stuff in his rainbow rice. He uncovered a Y cube, a Yak, two Y fridge magnets, the Y for his Leapfrog alphabet toy and a yoghurt. He was very excited at finding the yoghurt and held onto it while he used a teaspoon to spoon rice into an ice cube tray. Then he decided he was going to eat the yoghurt. I thought for sure that would be the end of the rainbow rice - I had visions of him pulling the lid off and upending the yoghurt into the rice tray. But I was pleasantly surprised when he took the yoghurt to the table, ate the whole thing and asked for another.

As we didn't have any printables to play with I drew an upper and lower case Y on our white board. But Goblin was too into eating yoghurt by that point and wasn't interested. Later in the day he decided that the  white board letters constituted mess and 'swept' them with his broom.

How to make Rainbow rice

(Goblin is 23 months)

Goblin has had a tub of beans and lentils to play with since he was about 18 months old. This can be used for pouring, spooning, hiding stuff in (for hide and seek games) - its a great piece of sensory equipment, and keeps Goblin entertained for ages. But as you may know from earlier posts I cannibalized the contents the other day to make the stuffing for our alphabet  bean bags.

So I wanted to replace it with a different tub. Lots of the blogs I read have made coloured rice. It looks so lovely and is such a nice sensory toy for toddlers. Check out this beautiful tub on Pink and Green Mama, and its great for eye spy bottles like the ones on Counting Coconuts

So how do you make it?
You will need - 

• food colouring (I found the artificial colouring came out brighter than the natural ones)
• a bag of rice
• some sandwich bags
• surgical spirit/rubbing alcohol (or alcohol handgel, which since swine flu last year you can pick up everywhere really cheap)

All the blogs I have read have suggested putting the rice in zip lock bags to dye it. Now I'm not sure whether zip lock bags are easier to come by in America but I didn't have a clue where to find them. So I bought self seal sandwich bags and they worked fine. 

I bought the cheapest rice I could find which happened to be Morrison's easy cook value rice, and split it into five sandwich bags. I popped the bags onto news paper so any leakage wouldn't dye the work surface. Then I added a splash of food colouring to each bag and a small amount of surgical spirit. The surgical spirit is just a medium to help spread the food colouring out. Its clever because it evaporates off leaving the rice dry and coloured.

I squished the rice around in the sandwich bags with the food colouring and surgical spirit until it had covered all the rice. Then I tipped it out onto baking trays to dry. I stuck my trays on the top of the oven under the extractor fan and turned the fan on. 
NOTE: The fumes of surgical spirit are pure alcohol so be really careful about breathing it in and don't do this in the same room as your toddler. If you haven't got an extractor fan open windows or doors. This is why you might want to go with the hand gel instead. 

I added all the colours together in one big tub, but if you wanted to do a theme you could just mix some colours - i am looking forward to doing orange and black rice at halloween. 
What you do with it from there is up to you. I hid some of Goblin's animals in the rice. And presented it to him on a tray with some scooping and pouring implements. 

First he went through the rice and rescued all the animals naming them as he went - he didn't remember the name for kangaroo, but penguin is an all time favourite. Once he'd rescued them he put them all back in the tub and buried them again. Then he fished them out once more. 

Then he started to fill one of the cups. First with the little sieve and then with his hands. The rice feels nice to touch and run through your fingers. I'd put down a plastic mat to make it easier to clear up the spilled rice but most of it stayed in the tray. 

And when he was done with the animals he moved on to pouring the rice from the cup to the jug and back again. This very simple activity kept him hooked for 45 minutes. 

I think most parents of toddlers, especially small boys, would appreciate that the small amount of time it takes to make coloured rice is amply compensated for when the activity it provides can keep your child entertained for three quarters of an hour at a time. 

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Addendum: Do NOT be tempted to let your toddler play with the rice before it has fully fully fully dried. It will stick to their clothes and be carried through out the house. It will also stain every piece of clothing they have with the food colouring. The rice may take a couple of days to dry but you really should wait unless you want to be hoovering the stuff up for the next decade. (Happy eleventh birthday Goblin - oh hang on while I pick up this rainbow rice!)

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