Sensory tables are such a great way to combine multiple sensory experiences and fine motor skills! And you can easily make them from things around the house!
This sensory table includes a bunch of festive fall colors and textures for the kiddos to explore! I added colored rice, dried acorns, fall-colored pompoms, and candy corn.
To make the rice you’ll need a bag of white rice, a ziplock bag, and red and yellow watercolors. You can also use food coloring but in order to spread the color around evenly you need to add a couple pumps of hand sanitizer, rubbing alcohol, or vinegar (and beware of spills or touching the rice before it dries because food coloring stains!)
Pour about 2/3 of the rice into the bag, add several drops of the red and yellow coloring, zip up and mix! The colors should mix so you get varying levels of red, orange and yellow. Lastly add the rest of the rice, zip, and mix. This will be the white of the candy corn!
Lay it out to dry – shouldn’t take long! Mine was dry in less than an hour. I placed a paper towel under it to help the process.
Add your chosen sensory items and it’s ready to go!
Rice is a perfect sensory table base because it’s completely edible and not a choking hazard!
Rice is also really great for developing fine motor skills (aka developing the coordination of small muscles like in the hands, fingers, wrists etc) because it is pinchable, scoopable, and pourable!
To help develop their fine motor skills even further you can add several things to any sensory table: spoons, scoops, cups, eye droppers, basically anything that requires them to grasp, squeeze, rotate the wrist, pinch, etc. Easy right?
In my class we have a set of toddler tools that focus on these special skills. You can find them on Amazon here.
Look at them working together! <3
Once you’re done with Halloween activities you can keep this rice for later! Its color is perfect for Thanksgiving sensory tables!
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