Sand Art? Colored Rice.

Sand Art

I loved the idea. It is about

working with colors and sensory play with textures

at the same time. So I bought some colored sand and bottles for our next craft project with my 20 months old. The bottles are great. They are made of clear plastic, have texture to them, colorful caps and strings to wear them as decorations. They are small: would have to fill them just enough for the project not to get boring. I've got an ice-cream cone and a tropical fish bottles. We are still to make the tropical fish.

Colored Rice.

Then I thought to use rice instead of sand. Camilla picked rice with her fingers (great for fine motor skills!) Rice is bigger than sand, which makes it faster to fill the bottle.

But not that fast. She has been filling that bottle for 3 days. A very hard working girl. She loved it first, seemed to be interested after several minutes, but wanted to play with pretty rice in different ways too. All that took time.

It is easy to color rice. Put some in a zip-lock bag with several drops of hand sanitizer and food coloring, seal the bag, and mix the rice with color for a couple of minutes. The rice should be dried before use. It appeared it was ready for use almost immediately though. The food coloring didn't stain the fingers. The smell of the hand sanitizer was gone fairly quickly too.

The final product looked very pretty. And we both were very proud of the accomplishments. It was a great stress relief for me too:

Art project - the best stress relief strategy ever!

What else do you like to do to decrease your stress level? I am in need for some advice with this recently :(