Rainbow Color Rice and Contact Paper a Preschool Activity

Looking for things to do with your rainbow-colored rice?

My preschoolers just love their rainbow rice play and since I still had a container full from our previous adventures, it is fast to set up to play with. Unfortunately, I can only offer a sensory tub so many times before it becomes boring to the kids and ends up with me doing a major cleanup because they are bored with the activity. So to change it up, we did something rather different.

Last week we played with contact paper and recycled materials, but what would happen if we used contact paper and rainbow colored rice? FUN!

Here is what you will need for this Rainbow rice Activity:

Rainbow-colored rice.
Contact paper.
Empty and clean spice bottles (make sure the holes are big enough).
A funnel/sheet of paper.

I filled the spice bottles just under halfway with colored rice by rolling a sheet of paper, because certain kids had run off with my funnels and they were nowhere to be found! The rice I used was the same color rice (recipe) we made almost 6 months ago, as well as the leftovers from making fireworks for 4 July.

I had help from my 4-year-old spreading the contact paper out and taping it down with duct tape; the 3-year-old came along shortly after to quickly grab a spice bottle and start shaking it!

The contact paper held up very well and the rainbow rice mix stuck to it enough that it didn’t end up all over the floor. My top tip for playing with colored rice is to play in an empty corner with a bit of space to easily sweep up the little bit that might mess OR take it outside!

I brought out the circle and triangle for my 4-year-old to experiment with; he filled them in with one color and then another color again on top. You can see this better in the video at the bottom of this post.