Before and After - The Lorax Sensory Tray

Sensory trays are perfect for bringing a book to life as well as being great fine motor skill practice and for general imaginative play. Our Lorax sensory tray has two stages, the first shows a happy world with brightly coloured truffula trees and the second a much gloomier tray after the Once-ler has had his way.

Materials

Dyed rice – to colour rice, simply place white rice in a sandwich bag, add some food colouring and shake until each grain is covered. Once dry, the rice can be played with.

Pipe cleaners and pom poms

Tweezers

Small fish counters

I glued pom poms to the top of pipe cleaners to make the truffula trees and used blue rice as the sea for the fish counters.

Toy truck

Toilet rolls

Construct your tray with the materials above. Can you think of anything else to add?

Once we’d finished playing with the first tray, we added black rice, a factory and a toy truck to model the later stages of the story. The second tray is much less cheery looking. The rice has turned black, the trees and fish are gone, and a factory has popped up.

Can you think of anything else we could’ve added?

Don’t forget to check out our other Lorax themed activities.

More book themed science for kids

Try my Gingerbread Science Experiments. Make a raft for the gingerbread man or put a gingerbread man in different liquids to find out what happens.

These Dr Seuss headbands from Simple Everyday Mom are gorgeous, too.

You might also like these Fairy Tale STEM Challenges!