Sensory play is so important to our children’s development right from the word go. These Rainbow Sky Sensory Bottles are beautiful and a great way to help young children explore and experience the seasonal changes around them.
Now Spring and Summer is round the corner we all start spending more time outside and children will be noticing the vibrant blue skies, the dreamy fluffy white clouds and if they are very lucky they may even spot a real rainbow!
These easy to make and totally gorgeous Rainbow Sky Sensory Bottles bring all that natural beauty and magic right indoors where it can be enjoyed close up again and again.
Children will love seeing, hearing and feeling their way around these colourful rainbow sky sensory bottles. Whether you want just one sensory bottle for home or lots for an early years setting this sensory play activity is super easy and thrifty to make, even those gorgeous little rainbows!
Rainbow Sky Sensory Bottles are a great sensory play activity for Spring, Summer and St Patrick’s Day and they lend themselves really well to any weather learning topics.
Rainbow Sky Discovery Bottles make such a great “Rainy” noise when they’re shaken they double up as musical instruments and are super fun to use with weather songs and nursery rhymes like “Sing A Rainbow” and “It’s Raining, It’s Pouring.”
Before you get started with this sensory bottle tutorial don’t forget to take a peek at some of our other favourite sensory play ideas while you’re here too. Meadow Gloop is a super messy fun way to explore nature, Spring Flower Sensory Bottles are fabulous for babies and toddlers and Edible Sensory Play Balls are a must try for everyone! Save them to your Facebook or Pinterest to find them again easily and share them with your friends.
Rainbow Skies Sensory Bottles Tutorial
Supplies To Make Gorgeous Rainbow Sky Sensory Bottles
- Plastic Bottle Washed and Dried
- Plain Uncooked White Rice
- Blue Acrylic Paint US / UK
- TP Rolls
- Narrow Rainbow Ribbon US / UK
- Cotton Balls US / UK
How To Make Rainbow Sky Bottles For Sensory Play
As this rainbow sky sensory play idea is contained within a bottle dying the rice is super easy by using a squirt of blue acrylic paint. Because little hands or water won’t actually be touching the rice I didn’t need to worry about making it colour fast.
(You’ll see in the video above that we’ve used the coloured rice in a sensory bin too and as long as it stayed dry it didn’t stain our fingers.)
Simply stir a squirt of blue acrylic paint into your rice and stir well until it’s evenly coloured.
Spread the rice out on a large tray to dry. We popped ours outside in the Spring sunshine and it dried in about an hour. It might need an occasional stir to turn the grains and break up any clumps that stick together.
Whilst your coloured rice is drying you can get busy making some cute rainbows. These rainbows are super simple to make from a TP roll and some narrow rainbow ribbon!
Cut your TP roll into rings the same thickness as your rainbow ribbon. Then cut each ring in half to make two semi circles.
Glue your rainbow ribbon onto both sides of your TP roll arches to make lovely little rainbows.
These little rainbows are fun to play with on their own too!
If you don’t have any rainbow ribbon you could easily make some little rainbows from polymer clay instead.
When your blue coloured rice and rainbows are ready it’s time to add them to your empty plastic bottle along with some cotton balls as fluffy white clouds.
Don’t overfill your bottle other wise the cotton ball clouds and TP roll rainbows won’t be able to move.
We hope you enjoy this idea for rainbow skies discovery bottles, sensory play is so important for our little ones!
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