Thinking Thursdays: Treasure in a bottle

We brought Junior J today to the Malaysian High Commission to settle his citizenship application.  We were told we had to bring the little boy there to collect all our forms, only to reach there and be given the forms without requiring the boy's presence at all!  Even though we felt it was quite unncessary to have brought him along, Junior J himself was quite happily occupied during the waiting time since I gave him a new toy: A treasure hunt in a bottle.  

I had read over at Childhood 101 about how you could make treasure bottles filled with rice, and decided to make one yesterday, since I had loads of expired food colouring that was still usable for non-edible projects.  Making it is simple... All you need would be rice (coloured or non-coloured is fine), a plastic drink bottle (yay for recycling!), and little things you could hide amidst the rice for your child to find.

I mixed about 3 tablespoonfuls of water with a few drops of red food colouring (I had read over here that mixing the colouring with water first would help to colour the rice more evenly), and added it to a bowl of rice and stirred until everything was coloured.  You need to let the rice dry before adding it to the bottle, so one way to ensure it dries quickly would be to sun the rice.  Or if you are like me and tend to do these projects at night when your kid is sleeping, you might want to just spread the rice on a plate and leave it in your room overnight if its air-conditioned.   The low humidity helps it to dry out, and the rice should be all ready in the morning when you wake up!

Then you need to fill up the bottle with the rice, I found that using a funnel made from used paper helped to make pouring much faster:

You could add the little treasures midway after some of your rice has been added (I chose a nature theme and used seashells and paper flowers):

And tada!  Your child's very own treasure hunt, in a bottle!  But wait... what's that black thing over there?

Let's give the bottle a good shake... Oh, its a black panther! :)

The boy had a good time shaking, shaking, shaking, and identifying the things he could see... and made growling noises when he saw the panther! 

For this activity, you could use objects that are similarly coloured to the rice to make the treasure hunt more difficult.  Rice is also really good for sensory play, and you could either let your toddler play in a "rice pit", or perhaps set some containers, spoons etc on a table and give them some rice in a bucket to play with (but be warned, it might get messy if they do spill some!).

What other ideas do you have for rice play?  Do share!

Come play at the Childhood 101 We Play link up!