Create a Christmas Scene with Rice

Christmas is such a visual time of year. It brings joy to my heart to see lights appear on indoor Christmas trees at night and community decorations make their yearly show on telephone poles and shop front windows.

Here is a great activity that you can do with children. Using coloured rice (tutorial can be found here), children create a Christmas scene!

You will need

Large platter
Contact paper to cover platter
Coloured Rice
Bells and other decorations (optional)

Simply remove the protective contact backing and cover the platter with the sticky surface exposed towards you. Offer your child a variety of coloured bags of rice (we just used Christmas colours) and have them use their fingers to create their Christmas scene.

Children can be as creative as they like! This type of activity is wonderful for their learning as it helps to develop fine motor skills when they are pinching to collect the rice but also their creativity and ability to reflect on what they know about Christmas.

Of course once the fun of making a scene is done, it is possible to pat down the rice, carefully remove the contact from the platter and hang up the coloured rice picture. Otherwise you might like to mix up the rice and do some writing or drawing.

The sticky contact surface makes this a greater sensory experience than simply moving rice on a platter.

Possum loved mixing up the colours and as she picked out individual grains of rice it opened up the doors for us to discuss what each colour was. Obviously the wider the variety of colours to choose from the harder this would be for a child.

Gorgeous fingers working on fine motor skills.

Possum loved this so much I decided to make her a simple sensory board using the left over coloured rice, bells and snips of tinsel. Although simple, she loved it!

What does your child love about Christmas?

Here are a few other Christmas ideas on Laughing Kids Learn