Coloring Rice

I have seen lots of blogs that talk about coloring rice for your kids and I really wanted to give it a try with my son. I pulled out a bag of rice, the Ziploc bags, the food coloring and then I realized I did not have enough alcohol in the house to do this activity.

I did already have my heart set on it though and since the rice is inexpensive, I decided to go ahead and wing it. I did not have alcohol in the house however I had lots of hand sanitizer in the house and it is mostly alcohol so I decided to use it in place of the alcohol.

I divided my rice evenly among 5 Ziploc bags for red, blue, green, yellow and purple rice. In each bag I used about 7-8 squirts of food coloring and about 2 squirts of hand sanitizer. I then squished the bags around until all of the rice was colored. Next I set the rice on the counter, in the bags to dry some. I came back about 1 hour later and things were colorful and dry. I poured it into our container with each color in a pretty row and it looked so beautiful! I was immediately glad that I did this project.

When my son came home, I showed him how pretty it was and then I dropped a few of the decorative erasers that you see everywhere in there and asked him to get them out with the measuring spoon or the ice tongs. He did pretty well but in about 35 seconds, it was no longer the pretty box I had made, it was his new creation and fortunately I thought it was pretty too!