Fluffy Clouds

(27 Months)

Since we've been spending all day outside during potty training, I've been doing a lot of messy art with the kids.  That's right, bring out the shaving cream, water table bubbles, the finger paint, the dot markers - let's get messy.  We're not going anywhere, so let's make a mess.

I found this fun shaving cream activity at Time for Play.  It's been on my to-do list for several weeks now and I've been excited to share it with them.  For the past two weeks they mostly have been asking to paint and use dot markers (which is the reason for the lack of posts lately, we haven't really done anything new).

The kids love playing with shaving cream, we've had fun with spraying shaving cream into our water table and creating shaving cream bath paint.  I knew they'd love this one, it has two of their favorite elements of play: 1- it's messy, very messy; 2- it's mostly shaving cream (or as Little Miss calls it "white").

We haven't really had too much practice with the eye droppers.  Each time we try to use them we wind up pouring out the entire content of the dropper in one squeeze.  I thought now would be a good time to practice doing a drip here and a drip there, but when they saw the can of shaving cream they were too excited to drip and drop.

I love the look of awe on Little Miss's
face when she sees the cornstarch change from white to blue.

We poured out a box of cornstarch into our bucket (I foolishly thought to use a bucket with a lid, so that we can play with ti again another day).  Next we filled the droppers with liquid water color (pink and blue), but when we added the shaving cream the colors were just too diluted and it barely changed the color of the fluff.

Then, we added the can of shaving cream and started to mix the cornstarch with the shaving cream.  It only took a few minutes of squishing and squeezing before the fluff formed.  It feels like damp flour, soft and light, yet moldable when you apply pressure.  They both loved making little snow balls and then breaking them apart. The compound is so delicate, just the slightest amount of pressure will break the ball apart.

They rolled the balls back and forth through the fluff.  They made really big balls and teeny tiny balls.   They tried stacking the balls on top of one another (but they kept crumbling).

Then we decided to make "muffins".  We first took out their big muffin tins from the ever plentiful Dollar Store.  This was a big hit!  They really enjoyed spooning the fluff into the muffin tins and patting the fluff down.

Then we decided to make "mini muffins" which really made Little Miss giddy.  "Teeny, tiny muffins!"

We made a huge mess.  This was all over the place!  I should have put an old sheet down first before we started playing.  The bulk of the mess came from when they would hold one of the muffins or meatballs outside of the box and they would crumble all over the table and floor.  At first I was trying to contain the mess and then I succumbed to the chaos.  We're not going to have much left over to play with anyway, we already made to big of a mess.  Plus that's what vacuums and hoses are for anyway!

The next time we do this, we're going to add giant marbles and toy cars (we can practice washing them in the bucket when we're done playing) to the bucket.  We'll also try first spraying the shaving cream, then adding the color and combine those two first before mixing in the cornstarch.  That's the beauty of two, they didn't know it was supposed to be pink and blue, then purple.  They just wanted to play with the "white".