Simple Rice Bin: Scoop & Pour for better Coordination

Hand Eye Coordination is such an important skill for our preschoolers. It affects their ability to build a block structure, throw and catch a ball, and even pick up a book and turn the pages. Practicing coordination can be so simple and fun with this simple rice bin sensory table invitation to scoop and pour.

The best invitations to play are the ones that take the teacher 3 minutes to set up, and keep the children engaged and playing for 30 minutes, right? This simple rice bin is exactly that. To set it up, we filled our sensory table with dry white rice. (I bought it in big 10 lb. bulk bag at the grocery store.) We added colorful little scoops from the party store. (I found them at the same time I scored those gorgeous swizzle stirrers for the light table!)

To begin, the students explore the rice with their hands and with the scoopers. They poured it into little containers and then poured it out onto each others’ hands. They buried their hands in the rice and spent time discovering the way that it feels.

This student used 2 scoopers and a coordinated movement to pile the rice into a bowl.

We like to keep the “base” of our sensory table (rice, chick peas, lentils, noodles, snow, etc.) the same for a few weeks. The students tend to lost interest (read: they ignore it or start to throw it around the room for fun) after a week, so we add in different accessories to extend their play. In this case, after a week we added pieces of pvc pipe from the hardware store.

The students put the pieces together to make different shapes. Then they used measuring cups to scoop and pour the rice into the pipes.

It takes good hand-eye coordination to hold the pipes, scoop the rice and pour it accurately into the tubes.

Our younger students were so interested to see what happened to the rice after they poured it into the pipes. They scooped, poured and observed it over and over again. Stay tuned to see what we add next!