This morning I decided to try a new sensory play experience with the children that two of my childminder friends were talking about at playgroup. It was so simple, and a really lovely activity, and as an added bonus the cleaning up afterwards was a doodle!!
Mix together cornflour and washing up liquid - that is it, done! I didn't know the quantities so I just guessed and got there in the end - my advice is add the washing up liquid slowly and mix it with your hands - eventually it will come together and form a sort of dough.
The (newly named) soap gloop was a fabulous sensory experience - you can mould it into shapes, squish it, snap it and stretch it - and it smells fabulous! And when you have finished playing all you need is running water to wash your hands and they are then squeaky clean! The children loved it, and so did I!
Today's activity was really good fun, and I think it might be top of my list of sensory activities - it feels DEVINE!
J helped to measure the soap flakes and water out and he poured them into a big mixing bowl. Then J helped me to mix the mixture using our electric whisk. J was amazed that the teeny flakes disappeared and in their place was a huge quantity of white fluffy soapy slime!
J mixed in some food colouring and then pronounced that he had made ice cream! Initially he used a spatula to mix the soapy slime and the food colouring, but once he got stuck in with his hands there was no stopping him.
The after school children also got stuck in to the soapy slime, they also loved squishing it with their fingers, and T enjoyed smothering it all over his arms too.
And the bonus of this activity was that the clean up operation was quite easy!!!
Over the past two weeks J and I have been doing quite a few different Autumnal activities which have either consisted of things we have done previously, or have been similar to things that we have done previously. I like to try new things with the children, and generally they enjoy doing new activities too, so with that in mind I decided that we would have a go at making wax crayon sun catchers.
J and I chose some crayons in Autumnal colours and then after a brief explanation as to why we have to be careful, J set about grating the crayons onto a sheet of greaseproof paper. This took a while!
Once we had enough grated wax I put a second sheet of greaseproof paper over the wax and with the iron on the lowest setting (and with J removed from the very immediate vicinity) I ironed the wax gratings until they melted. J was amazed at the blob that we created! I however wasn't - I had hoped for something pretty, but we had used far too much dark coloured wax and it just looked horrid! So we tried again with much brighter colours which produced a much nicer melted blob!
We covered the wax to clear contact paper on both sides, I punched two holes and J helped me to thread a ribbon through the holes so that he could hang his sun catcher up - all we need now is some sun!
It is a while since the children played with water beads, and as J is now older I thought it would be a nice idea to really spend quite a bit of time discussing and investigating the beads before adding water, just after we added the water, and then hours after adding water. J was very excited about our experiment.
The dry beads were tiny and very hard, and they stuck to our hands!
We added water and within half an hour the beads had started to absorb the water and swell up - they were squishy!
Even the older children found it therapeutic playing with the beads!
After the beads had absorbed all the water, I added some containers and spoons etc from the children's kitchen and the children had lots of fun scooping and spooning the beads into various containers. There were beads bouncing everywhere!
