Draw faces on some balloons and let the kids loose with any old make-up you have lying around. Face paint should work too.
Given that I don’t wear make-up on a day to day basis (ok, or ever unless it’s a wedding or something – it’s too much like work), my kids have no idea what to do with it. But they had lots of fun smearing it over the balloons all the same.
It got a bit messy, but it wasn’t too hard to wipe up from the table and wash off the boys.
We did this as a follow on activity a couple of days after trying out a bubbling mud kitchen. It was just as messy, but less structured.
I simply took the mud we’d already used and added a bunch of construction toys and cars for a child-led, messy, sensory play.
Elly went back to filling his pots and had a little drive of a car, but distracted by Zeph taking a toilet break, he pretty quickly decided that a bath was the more interesting option.
Zeph meanwhile spent a good long time filling his trucks, creating roads and tracks for the cars to drive on and simulating earthquakes and mudslides to trap them.
This is a gloriously messy, strictly outdoors activity that I saw a version of on The Keepsake Co….Except we don’t have an outdoors and I really wanted to try it. So I threw down a plastic sheet and did it on the verandah – we have a wash-down floor out there which helps with clean-up.
You need:
Mud (I used a big plant pot full)
Baking soda (I used around 175g… I have no idea exactly what different proportions would do without experimenting, but we produced some fair bubbling)
Vinegar in squeezy/spray bottles
Optional, ideas of things to decorate the baking with:
Paint powder or crushed chalk
Flowers
Sticks
Stones
Birdseed
This was premeditated, believe it or not, so I had Zeph and Elly crush chalk for it a couple of days beforehand: we put our chalk sticks in a ziploc bag and bashed it with a rolling pin and a mallet. That went down very well.
For the mud kitchen itself we got out various kitchen utensils, pots, pans and baking tins and started out with the mud mixed with baking soda.
Once they’d prepared a few cakes and pancakes and waffles I got out the crushed chalk and some flowers for decorating with.
Next they took the vinegar in squeezy bottles and made their creations bubble!
Finally, once we filled, refilled and ran out of vinegar, they dumpedthe mud out and played with it a bit more.
And then I dumped them both in the bath, locking the verandah door behind us and closing my eyes to the mess for a day (okay, 2) so that we could use it again for this mud construction and race track activity.
I had no intention for the boys to shred the polystyrene strawberry box. But at some point while I was cooking dinner that was exactly what they started doing.
And they had SO MUCH FUN!!!
They pulled it and poked it with their fingers, they tried scissors and pencils on it, they jumped up and down on it and smooshed through the pieces.
And I let them.
Yes, it made some mess. No, it wasn’t much fun to clean up because the itty bitty bits kind of static to things and kind of float around so it’s not the easiest thing to sweep. And I was slightly worried that Elly might start trying to eat it (he didn’t). But I did have help with the clean up. And they learned and experienced.
And I cooked peacefully with not one interruption throughout.
Up until now, I’ve done a lot of messy, sensory activities with my kids, many of which would at some point involve my oldest asking for his cars (if he didn’t already have them), and using them with any material to make little role plays and stories. What we haven’t done, and what I’ve recently been very excited to start exploring, is small world play.
So here was our first attempt: a small world swamp. The kids helped me make it first, which may or may not have been a good idea… I think they kind of had fun, but I had a particular idea of what I wanted to achieve before letting them loose on it so I was limiting their input and creativity in this stage.
We used food coloured cornflour gloop for the swamp (mix water and cornflour, super easy); borrowed some of the rabbit’s sawdust as swamp mulch; made some spiky swamp grass by sticking cocktail sticks into polystyrene balls; used green pompoms for swamp bushes; and added some lollipop sticks for logs (some real twigs and stones would have been great, but it’s been freezing and we’ve all been sick on and off… also, as much as my sons would like it, I don’t allow them to keep a stash of sticks and stones in the tiny apartment). Finally we added some insects, spiders and a crocodile.
The first thing both of them were interested in was the gloop. Elly started digging at it with a lollipop stick and Zeph started squishing bugs into it to make prints. Then, they pretty quickly moved on to sprinkling and then tipping the sawdust into the gloop. Zeph’s crocodile started eating sawdust, and after we tipped off the excess, they both had a go at making circle shaped prints with toilet roll middles.
At this point Elly retired for a long milk break. Meanwhile Zeph spent a long time tipping the messy tray this way and that to watch the mulchy gloop sliding around. Now, when I first said activity time and started setting things out, Zeph immediately went and got some cars and laid them out too. I think he was was a little bit confused when I wanted to put them aside for the beginning at least. The cars did get a look in at this point though. I thought it was the end of any kind of themed small world play, but actually they were only out for a couple of minutes before he set them aside again to concentrate on the crocodile and the wonderful swamp mixture he was concocting!
The crocodile went from gloop to sawdust and back again. It got buried, and stuck and sprinkled. It was force-fed sawdust. The spiky swamp grass got pulled apart and mixed into the gloop. Zeph asked for more water to make the gloop more liquid, and he asked for shapes that he used to scoop and tip. Until, finally, he had enough.
Did it stay a small world play activity all the way through? No. But was it lots of fun and a good activity? Yes!
Slow Days, Small Feet 