Rainbow Rice Uppercase and Lowercase Letter Match

One of our favorite kinds of play is sensory play. I love me some sensory play so much that I modify them to fit my preschooler. My three year old loves preschool sensory activities. So many materials to work with, so much learning involved.

One our favorite go to sensory materials for our preschool sensory activities, is rice. We really like rice, red rice, yellow rice, brown rice, white rice. You get the point? We like rice! So when we started working on uppercase and lowercase letter recognition. Of course I came up with this idea to play alphabet hunt with a sensory bin of rice. My then three year old was happy every time she actually got a match

To make this alphabet sensory bin you need

• Rice (we used neon colored rice)
• Foam upper or lowercase letter stickers (I used uppercase foam letters)
• Paper with either opposite letters (I wrote lowercase letters on our paper)
• Small bin

 

I mixed the letters and rice together in the bin and laid the paper with lowercase letters next to the bin.

The object of this activity was for my preschooler to pull the uppercase letters from the bin and then search on the paper for its lowercase match and stick the uppercase foam letter to the match.

Now for this activity I offered no help to my four year old. She went through the process of elimination. The letters that she did not know she set those aside in a pile on the side of the paper. Once we’ve found all 26 letters she goes through the unknown letters and starts the search of which letter is this. She examines and sees if they have similarities then continues down the line. Eventually she had all the letters covered and I was able to pin point the letters that we really needed to work on more.

The is one of our favorite preschool sensory activities that we play over and over again. We just modify it to fit her level at that point. A great time for us to play this is in the A.M. Before we eat breakfast. My preschooler is up before my toddler is in the morning so this is one of our golden hours. The setup is easy and I can have it out and ready for her in the morning to play with. It does not take her much time to complete the activity the sensory part (the rice) keeps her quiet and engaged but calmed so that I may precede with getting breakfast ready. When my one year old comes down my three year old is done, and she can now enjoy the sensory bin also. That is why I love preschool sensory activities! They serve more than one purpose.