Children (and adults) learn best and retain the most information when they engage their senses.

By giving children the opportunity to investigate materials with no preconceived knowledge, you’re helping them develop and refine their cognitive, social and emotional, physical, creative and linguistic skillsets.

These sensory experiences provide open-ended opportunities where the process is more important than the product; how children use materials is much more important than what they make with them.

For this activity, we explored the physical properties of a prairie using colored rice. As your little ones manipulated the rice with their hands, they used many different words to describe its texture and temperature, giggling with their friends as they did so!