St. Patrick's Day and Rainbow Rice

I'm not Irish... well I may be but if I am it's a percentage of a percentage. So although I had planned for Leprechauns to visit our house and leave gold and mischief, I didn't get my act together in time, plus I was up the night before with D Man and was in a zombie state in the morning.
However, because I was up with D Man, he slept alot in the morning which allowed me ample time to do projects with Lily.

A few weeks ago, I did have the sense to purchase a $1 wooden cut out leprechaun mask for Lily to paint :

She is saying "cheese" here.

When she was done she kept calling it "Beauty and the Beast".  I don't know, I guess she thought it looked like the Beast. Here's the finished product:

Notice that the shamrock is filled in perfectly and the rest is random splotches....

Then, we made carrot snack sticks from Weelicious.com.  I try to make these once a week because Lily does not like vegetables. She chose the snack "sticks"  to be cut into the shapes of planes, hearts and the letter "T". This is the only picture I have:

Next, we made our first sensory bin. I started out with making Rainbow Rice. There are many different recipes on the web but here is how I did it:

I used:

1 cup of rice

1 tablespoon of rubbing alcohol

25 drops of food coloring

Lily helped me count the drops of food coloring

Then she shook it all up to disperse the color.

Lily got bored after two colors and went to do other things.... To make the purple I did 15 drops of red and 15 drops of blue. For orange, I put in 15 drops of red and 15 drops of yellow.

Then I poured it out on cookie sheets with foil and let it dry.  Due to the rubbing alcohol, it dried pretty quickly and was done in about 15 minutes.

Then I poured out most of the rice into this container. I saved some for a future project..... :)

Lily helped me mix it up and started playing with it, using cups, spoons and funnels. At first I just put the small container on a tray.... then when Lily went down for a nap, I cleaned up the ginormous mess of rice on the floor and put it in a bigger container on top of a large sheet.

And through most of it , D Man was asleep. but here he is awake. ;)

There are a ton of ideas for sensory bins on the web. You can do a search on the web or go to some of my favorite sites:

Pink and Green Mama

Counting Coconuts

Growing Up Our Style