Tweet Tweet-- Birds Sensory Tub

 

In order to convince my son to get out of the heat and come inside and enjoy the air conditioning, I told him that I would put together his Bird Sensory Tote. A few months ago I participated in a swap with a group of women to create the perfect bird themed sensory tub. I ended up holding off on putting this one together because we had so many set up. For those of you that do not  know what a sensory tub/tote is, it is a tub or a bin that you fill up with various items to let your child be hands-on. Sensory activities provide children with another meaningful avenue of learning. There are handmade birds, bird houses, a wooden cutout of a bird cage, a bird bath, owls, bird eggs, birds toob, nests, feathers, and more. My filler is colored rice because I forgot to pick up bird seed, otherwise it would have been bird seed. My son is enjoying this-- all you hear is TWEET TWEET!

Check out our spring sensory tub and our butterfly sensory tub too!

Glowing Rainbow Rice



Lately, we are all about anything that glows! We LOVE our blacklight and put it to good use! We also enjoy Glow-in-the-dark play. We have made tons of colored rice for play, but today we made Glow Rice! The colors are very vibrant and it takes the rice sensory play to a whole new level! Glow Rice is simple to make and you can find almost everything you need in the dollar store. You have two options with this: If you use glow-in-the-dark paint, your rice will glow in the dark. Or, you can use neon/fluorescent paint and your rice will GLOW under a blacklight.  The paints can be found in Walmart and craft stores. We picked our blacklight up at Walmart for under $11.00.

You will need:
Rice

zip-lock bags

Neon/Fluorescent or glow in the dark paint

 Rubbing alcohol

Place the desired amount of rice for each color in a Ziploc bag.  Add about a tablespoon of the glowing paint of your choice and about one tablespoon of rubbing alcohol. The rubbing alcohol helps coat the rice, watering down the paint so you need less and helps the rice dry faster.  Seal the bag and then shake, knead, and mix until the rice is evenly coated.  Then lay the rice out to dry on a cookie sheet. I periodically "mix" the rice up to help it dry completely.  When the rice is dry and it is dark, get ready for some GLOWING fun!!

We added some glow in the dark stars for play.

The colors are so vibrant and pretty under the black light.

 

My son insisted we add the neon blue rice we made the other day to the rest of the rainbow glow rice. It looks awesome, huh?