Our three-year-old, Elena, came home from preschool with a treat bag full of goodies like stickers, candy, and little Halloween toys. I love how excited kids get over the littlest things like a stretchy skeleton or a spider ring.
But what do you do with those things once the excitement wears off?
You make a fine motor sensory bin.
I love how the purple rice makes everything pop! I used to think Halloween was all orange and black, but these Halloween sensory bins inspired me to try new colors!
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How to Make Halloween Sensory Rice
You’ll need:
- dry, uncooked rice
- white vinegar
- food coloring
Dying rice is really easy. I tried to make it harder on myself by using leftover red-dyed rice from another sensory bin we made.
That did not go so well. Although the rice turned out to be a beautiful raspberry color, raspberry wasn’t the color I wanted. So I started over.
Here’s what I did.
STEP ONE: Pour 5 cups of white rice into a glass bowl.
STEP TWO: Sprinkle 1 tablespoon of white vinegar over the rice.
STEP THREE: Stir in 1/4 teaspoon of purple gel food coloring.
Wondered why the gel coloring wasn’t spreading well… then added 1/2 tablespoon of water. Ahh… now it’s working!
So if you’re using gel like I did, a little water will help the color spread more evenly.
If you’re using regular liquid food coloring, I would advise mixing the red and blue together to make purple before adding it to the rice or you’ll end up with red, blue, and purple rice. (You don’t have to add water to this mixture.)
STEP FOUR: Spread the rice in an even layer on a baking sheet.
STEP FIVE: Let the rice concoction dry for a couple hours. I tested it out by running my hands through it.
(NOTE: Nail polish remover or hand sanitizer will get stains out of your hands if you forget that food coloring stains like I did when I tried to poke a glob of coloring back into the little jar. Big mistake.)
Making the Halloween Fine Motor Sensory Bin
Once the rice was dry, I left it in the baking sheet and added the Halloween toys and a few purple, orange, and green items from around the house.
I also twisted a few black pipe cleaners together to make spiders. These spiders were shrieked at and promptly buried by Elena, the arachnophobic.
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Here are some of the items from our Halloween sensory play with shopping links:
If you’re looking for an assortment of Halloween things for your bin, try a mega-pack like this one that has a little bit of everything. The things you don’t use can be given away to trick-or-treaters!
Also, I left our rice in the baking sheet and it got pretty messy. Next time, I’d probably use our normal sensory bin set up of a small, shallow bin inside a big underbed storage bin.
Fine motor tools add a whole new dimension to sensory bin play. We bought this set, which comes with two ball scoopy things and orange tweezers. I added an orange shovel and another pair of tweezers.
Colored bowls are always a great for our sensory bins. Even if kids aren’t interested in color sorting (which Elena wasn’t today and Lia isn’t yet), bowls are always fun to fill up or use to make “soup.”
The shape blocks (linked a set similar to ours) surprisingly got a lot of action. They’re hollow on the inside, so the girls turned them over and filled them with rice. Elena used one to make a hot tub for the stretchy skeleton. Hilarious, right??
What We’re Learning
As you probably guessed from the title, this sensory bin was all about fine motor skills. Using tweezers and scoops to pick up things, grabbing handfuls of rice, picking out individual toys and manipulating them all help to strengthen hand muscles.
Lia spent the entire time using the orange scoop to fill any and all available containers. To me it seemed like she was conducting her own little experiment: how much rice can this container hold?
The girls got plenty of visual stimulation from the purple, green, orange, and black items. Purple, green, and black are considered calming colors, while orange is an energizing color.
I’m not sure how much that affected the kids, or if they were simply calmer from having just woken from their naps, but they did play very nicely together and with the rice!
Your Turn to Make a Halloween Sensory Bin
It doesn’t matter if you have Halloween-y things to add to your sensory bin. It’s all about the purple rice anyway!
Look for small purple, orange, and bright green items from around the house to add to your sensory bin. Throw in a few bowls and fine motor tools and your Halloween sensory bin will be ready for play!