Valentine’s Day Sensory Box Play

Sensory play with colored rice!

Valentine’s Day is here. Let’s make a Valentine’s day sensory box with colored rice for the win! World of texture, color, and fun creating this engaging activity for your little ones. The perfect box to keep littles engaged for some time. My 3 year old is loving this one the last couple of days. She was so excited to see the different colored rice in her box. 

What we used to make our sensory box:

I’m trying to keep our sensory boxes simple and use what we have around the house.

• Our favorite tools
• Dye Rice
• Heart jelly beans
• Heart shape Easter egg

Some other great things you can use:

• Craft Pom poms 
• Heart shape beads
• Pasta
• Candy conversation Hearts

How to dye your rice:

I was shocked how easy this step was. So I will be using rice in our boxes more. I have also read that you can use this to dye pasta and beans. I will be giving that a try soon. Let’s dye some rice for today’s box!

What you need:

• 10-15 drops of food coloring
• 1 cup white rice (I had some minute rice to use up that no one in my family was a fan of so it worked perfect for this)
• 1 tsp rubbing alcohol
• Quart size zip lock bag
• Paper towels

How to make:

Add your rice to your zip lock bag

Add rubbing alcohol to your rice. Give a good shake to mix well. This step is important to help spread the color to your rice and dry quickly.

Add 10-15 drops of food coloring to your rice. The more you add the brighter your color will be. We did 15 drops.

Seal the bag and give a good shake till all the rice is covered.

Lay your colored rice out to dry on paper towels. We let ours sit for about 30 minutes.

Ways we use our Valentine’s sensory box:

• Counting the Jelly beans

I made little flash cards with numbers and dots. She would find the jelly beans on the dots to count at the end. This activity ended up being my daughters favorite. 

• Counting scoops 

We used the flashcards again for this activity. Add scoops into our Heart bowl. 

• Playing “hide n seek” with the jelly beans buried in the rice

This is another favorite. I would have her cover her eyes and I would hide 3 of the jelly beans in the rice for her to find. 

• Sorting the different colors of Jelly Beans 

With our jelly beans we had red and pink so we worked on sorting them out.

Here are the flash cards I made to help with counting for my 3 year old. Enjoy this free printable!

We hope you and your little one enjoy this box as much as we did. For some more fun theme sensory boxes check out our previous blogs here..