Easy homemade play ‘sand’

Last weekend, Cole wanted to make some art projects with sand.  You know – those fun-looking jars with all the colored sand that your kids can make at fairs or the beach.  While I have lots of colored pasta and rice, I don’t have any sand.  While I was looking for ideas, I came across some fun things for us to do but nothing with what I had in the house, so I came up with this project.  Total time for this project is between 15-30 minutes, depending on how much your child ‘helps’  🙂

You will need:

  1. Colored cereal – I used Fruit Loops but others have used Fruity Pebbles. Any cereal like this will do
  2. Rolling pin – or something to crush the cereal
  3. Zip bags
  4. Funnel – although if you don’t have one, one made with paper or your hands should be fine. It just helps keeps the mess down.
  5. SMALL container to put the cereal in – keep in mind that the cereal will crush to almost nothing when picking out jars. I used a spice container and it worked perfect
  6. Bowls for sorting the cereal – I used our trusty applesauce cups

Directions:

  1. Sort the cereal by colors
  2. Then put each color in a bag and crush it until it is very, very small pieces. The smaller the better.  I used only 1 bag and started with yellow, then continued with the colors of the rainbow.
  3. Once they are all crushed, use a funnel or your hands to put the ‘sand’ in the bottle. Make sure it goes all the way to the top otherwise, once the lid is on it will mix up.  Our ‘sand’ also got stuck in the funnel, and I used a chop stick to push it through.  That worked very well.

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