How to Dye Rice for Rainbow Rice!

Learn how to dye rice the EASY way so your child can enjoy rainbow rice for sensory play! It’s just as much fun to play with as it is to look at!

Sensory play is essential for kids of all ages, but especially crucial for the little ones. This is a really fun and beautiful way to engage your child in sensory play!

Something especially great about rainbow rice is that it’s not sticky. Some kids have a hard time with mud or slime because it sticks to their hands, but there are no such problems with rainbow rice. It’s very dry, and it has a very pleasant feel to it.

I honestly enjoy playing with rainbow rice alongside my kids – it makes a nice sound when pouring it and moving it around, and its feel is quite mesmerizing. I encourage you to have fun giving it a try yourself!

Ingredients to Dye Rice the Easy Way

Another great thing about rainbow rice is that it’s really easy to make! I don’t even bother measuring because it’s SO easy to make and hard to mess up.

Here’s what you will need:

dry white rice (I buy it in bulk at Costco, but this 10lb bag would work well too!)
rubbing alcohol
ziplock freezer bags
Liquid watercolors or food coloring

One quick note: I’ve seen recipes that call for vinegar, but I do not recommend it. Rubbing alcohol has three advantages:

The rice colors are more vibrant when rubbing alcohol is used.
The rice dries much more quickly and the process of making rainbow rice requires no measuring if you do it this way!
After the initial dyeing process, rainbow rice make with rubbing alcohol doesn’t have any odor aside from that of dried rice!

How to Dye Rice to Make Rainbow Rice

Step 1: Decide how many colors you’ll want to make. It is possible to reuse some of the bags twice without cleaning them out if you make them in the right order.

For example, make red rice in a bag and then make orange rice in the same bag. Another example would be to make yellow rice in one bag, and then make green rice in that same bag!

I like to keep a decent supply of rainbow rice on hand because it’s my preschooler’s favorite sensory activity! So after I made the initial batch of rainbow rice, I just make a couple of colors at a time to replace what inevitably gets spilled out of the container.

Step 2: Pour some dry rice in a gallon bag. I’d say at least 1 cup of each color you want to make!

Step 3: Squirt some food coloring or liquid watercolors on the dry rice in the bag. For the blue rice, I used liquid watercolors (this set has lasted me several years of art projects including many batches of rainbow rice!).

Step 4: Squirt just enough rubbing alcohol on the dry rice and coloring in the bag that you’ll be able to shake the bag around and coat the rice with the rubbing alcohol+dye mixture.

Step 5: Shake it, baby! Make sure your bag is sealed and shake it up until all of the rice is coated in the coloring. This is a great step for kids to help with if you’re sure your bag is sealed!

Step 6: Pour out the rice on a tray or cookie sheet. Spread it out and let it dry! Because of rubbing alcohol’s drying properties, this won’t take very long: 15 mins on average if you spread it out!

This is how the rice looks when it’s still a bit wet with dye and rubbing alcohol:

To demonstrate that food coloring is also great for making vibrant colored rice, I made a fresh batch of yellow rice too. This was taken while it was in the drying phase:

Once dry, it’s ready to play with!!

Play Ideas and Storage Tips for Rainbow Rice

Lately our favorite place to use rainbow rice has been in our water table outside. I emptied and dried the water table and then poured the rice in and gave the kids some measuring cups and spoons – it’s been a hit!

My older kids enjoy weighing and balancing the scales of our rainbow rice with this scale. My preschooler usually just fills the bins as full as she can ;).

We recently had a preschool play group at our house and every kid was gathered around the rainbow rice table!

Playing with rainbow rice outdoors is nice because I really don’t care if they spill it – it’s no problem to sweep up whatever comes out of the bin, and if I miss a bit, it’s no big deal because it’s outside. It’s worth mentioning that I’ve never seen a bird try to eat the dyed rainbow rice in all the years we’ve been playing with it!

When it’s too hot or too cold to be outside for very long, I put the rainbow rice it in a long aluminum catering try like this. I’ve been using the same tray for 4 years! I store it up high when it’s not being used.

Sometimes putting a dish inside the tray can reduce the amount of rice that spills, but it vacuums up pretty easily and keeps my kids happily occupied for a long time, so I don’t mind the bits that spill out and so I typically just use the single tray!

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