Rice/Salt "Sand" Art

Someone asked what craft activities could be done with baby food jars. This is a great one for the summer, a beach theme, ocean theme or rainbow theme.

Here's a sneak peak inside my baby food jar bin. We are STOCKED! This heavy bin is holding a gate up on one side, so I couldn't get it any wider. I have a few hundred in there, generously donated by my friend Kimber.

Sand is not friendly to my vacuum or plumbing, so we try to do that OUTSIDE. Plus, the pretty, very fine, CLEAN and sanitized white sand that holds color well that I would like for these types of projects, is VERY expensive at the pet store/aquarium shop. So instead, we use rice or salt.

I had a variety of rice and salt already colored, so I decided to use up what we all ready had available.

The salt is very uniform in size. To make it look more like sand, you can add Kosher or other larger grain salt to the finer stuff  for a greater variety to the texture.

The rice I place into my coffee/spice grinder...

Give it a whirl with a few shakes...and it comes out multi-textured and multi-shaded in color.

I set out the colored rice and salt in small containers.

They were given the sticker box to decorate their baby food jars on the outside.

Then they filled their jars using baby formula scoops, which are the perfect size. For this and a lot of things.

They LOVED this activity and were VERY proud of the results.

Since they are glass, I asked the parents to be observant of how they were handled by the children. I also did not have time to seal the lids on with hot glue or super glue, so that was left to the parents as well.

I went to Miss B's 5 yo birthday party last weekend and mom had them sitting in the kitchen window, a pretty rainbow against the sky.

Since this was a spur of the moment craft,
to have pics to show someone, I went back and spray painted the lids with a spray paint for metal. The red I had was clogged, so they got black and hammered silver. Normal paint will not stick to these slick lids, it needs to be for metal.

Tags: rice, salt, sand, art, craft, layered, layers, preschool, pre-k, child, care, daycare, child, children's, rainbow, beach, ocean, theme, unit, summer, fine motor, color, colors,