Rice play and mosaics

On Friday we had some friends over to play. I had just colored a bunch of rice, so as soon as it had cooled from drying in the oven I set it on the table in reach of the little ones. It was a matter of minutes before Emmett had run back to his bedroom and brought out a collection plastic and wooden animals and invited his little friend to play "Farm" with him. She thought that was a great idea! Claire wandered through after a while but didn't stay for too long. Elowen and Emmett however, played for about 45 minutes with the colored rice and the animals. When they finally wandered away to play something different I printed several simple coloring pages onto card stock and put out glue and lots of different colors of rice and beans and seeds to work with. Pretty soon the kids came back through the kitchen and saw everything set up differently. I explained what a mosaic was and showed them how to do put the seeds onto the glue to color their pictures. The bigger kids did everything themselves while I helped the little ones by applying the glue for them, and they did the rest on their own. They had a great time! The clean up really wasn't too bad. I just raked all of the spilled rice and seeds etc. off of the table onto the floor and swept it all up when they where done!