How to Make a Rainbow Rice Sensory Bin for Preschool

Do your kids like playing and learning with sensory bins? This rainbow rice sensory bin is super easy to make and it’s also a great addition to a rainbow, color, or St. Patrick’s Day theme. Use it with or without the gold coins.

How to Make a Rainbow Rice Sensory Bin

Here’s what you’ll need to set-up this fun sensory experience in your own classroom. If you’re new to the world of sensory bins be sure to check out my introduction to a sensory table here.

1. Gather Rice Sensory Bin Supplies

Glitter Liquid Watercolors
White Rice
Plastic Gallon Bags
Wax Paper
Optional: Plastic Gold Coins
Optional: Permanent Marker

2. Make Colored Rice for Sensory Bin

You can invite your students to help you color the white rice for a fun science experiment.

Start by pouring one bag of dry white rice into a plastic gallon ziplock bag.

Next, squirt a good amount of liquid watercolor into the bag and mix. You’ll know if you don’t have enough liquid watercolor if your rice isn’t brightly colored after mixing.

Continue pouring rice into the plastic bags and adding liquid watercolor until you have one bag of each color of the rainbow.

3. Let the Colored Rice Dry

Then spread wax paper out on a table and dump the bags of colored rice on top to dry.

The liquid watercolors dry very quickly in about 30-60 minutes depending on the climate where you live.

4. Let Your Kids Explore the Rainbow Rice Sensory Bin

Your kids will love the vibrant, beautiful colors in this sensory bin, but don’t expect it to stay pretty for long! As the kids dig in and start to explore the rainbow colored rice, they will mix the colors – and that’s fine.

Ask your kids open-ended questions as they play in the rainbow sensory bin like, “How does it feel?”

For an extra St. Patrick’s Day twist, you can add some gold coins to your sensory bin. Your kids will love “discovering” the hidden treasures in the colorful rice.

You can even take it a step further and write letters of the alphabet (or even numbers!) on the plastic coins.

Invite your kids to match the gold coins with letters to an alphabet chart or use one of these sensory bin letter hunt sheets.

More Rice Sensory Bin Ideas

If you like this sensory bin then you may also enjoy these other sensory bin ideas that you can use in your pre-K or kindergarten classroom throughout the year.